Home is Where the Forest Is….. NOT the Oil Palm Plantation
Posted under: Oil palm plantations are no place for an Orangutan. As we’ve previously blogged, oil palm plantations are responsible for large scale destruction of mega-diverse tropical rainforests across Southeast Asia. One day these forests are important orangutan habitats and then the next day they are giant oil palm plantations.
But can orangutans survive in other human-modified landscapes? Can they live anywhere besides natural forests ?
Credit: Christopher Chan / Flickr CC – Demand Sustainable Palm Oil so this little guy can keep his home? Doesn't seem like too much to ask for.
In Southeast Asia, although oil palm plantations are the main driving force behind rainforest destruction, rainforests have also been modified by people for small-scale agroforestry production of crops like rubber (What’s agroforestry? It’s when, for example, they grow a crop IN an actual forest, because there is a benefit from combining trees and shrubs with crops and/or livestock.) So although we’ve known for a while that conversion of rainforests into oil palm agriculture was a growing threat to saving orangutans, a new study published in PLoS One (a Public Library of Science journal) suggests that although orangutans can’t live in oil palm plantations, they can survive in small-scale agricultural landscapes in Sumatra. (where’s Sumatra?)
“The finding from my study is that orangutans can survive, demographically, in certain types of degraded landscapes, foraging on a mixture of crops and wild fruits,” said Gail Campbell-Smith, lead scientific author of the study. “However, the poor quality habitat offered to orangutans by oil palm plantations…is cause for concern since this is the land use type that is most rapidly replacing the preferred forest habitat across both Sumatra and Borneo.” According to Campbell-Smith, the results might surprise some researchers. “It has always been inferred that these types of landscapes [human altered agroforests] are not suitable landscapes for orangutans. But historically there has never been any major study in these types of landscapes to back this up—my study is the first.”
Although the findings of this study appear to be good news for orangutans, whose primary habitats in undisturbed forests are getting smaller and smaller daily, the study also found that although orangutans were able to survive in human-modified habitats, they displayed significant changes in behavior. For example, they would leave their nests at different times than orangutans living in forests, and also changed their eating patterns. “In a nut shell, my study highlights that although orangutans have adapted to this agroforest environment, it is at the expense of their natural behavior.
Credit : Michael Thirnbeck, Flickr (Mangiwau ) – Oil palm plantations cutting into tropical forests – aka home for orangutans, and thousands of other species.
So what have we learned? The single most important recommendation for conserving orangutans on Sumatra and Borneo is preventing oil palm and agricultural expansion (i.e. habitat loss),” said Campbell-Smith. Preventing further habitat loss for orangutans is no small task, but efforts to reduce the damaging effects of oil palm expansion, such as the work the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, are our best bet to help protect orangutans and their forests. “Encouraging government initiatives to exercise a more environmentally-focused land-use, avoiding conversion of degraded forests, and the integration of transformed landscapes into broader conservation planning is a step in the right direction if orangutans have any chance of survival,” Campbell-Smith said.
Take home point: WE NEED to keep natural forests standing, because even though it looks like orangutans may be able to live in other habitats, their best shot at surviving is staying in their natural habitats. One big step to keep their homes intact would be to not deforest in order to set up oil palm plantations.
That doesn’t seem to0 hard, does it?
