Measuring Metrics of Climate Change and Its Implication on the Endangered Mammal Conservation in the Leuser Ecosystem

• Published in: Frontiers in environmental science 2021-09, Vol.9
• Main Authors: Condro, Aryo Adhi, Prasetyo, Lilik Budi, Rushayati, Siti Badriyah, Santikayasa, I Putu, Iskandar, Entang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: biodiversity; climate change; conservation; mammal; tropical landscape
• ISSN: 2296-665X; 2296-665X
• DOI: 10.3389/fenvs.2021.713837

The Leuser Ecosystem is one of the essential landscapes in the world for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. However, the Leuser Ecosystem has suffered many threats from anthropogenic activities and changing climate. Climate change is the greatest challenge to global biodiversity conservation. Efforts should be made to elaborate climatic change metrics toward biological conservation practices. Herein, we present several climate change metrics to support conservation management toward mammal species in the Leuser Ecosystem. We used a 30-year climate of mean annual temperature, annual precipitation, and the BIOCLIM data to capture the current climatic conditions. For the future climate (2050), we retrieved three downscaled general circulation models for the business-as-usual scenario of shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP585). We calculated the dissimilarities of the current and 2050 climatic conditions using the standardized Euclidean distance (SED). To capture the probability of climate extremes in each period (i.e., current and future conditions), we calculated the 5th and 95th percentiles of the distributions of monthly temperature and precipitation, respectively, in the current and future conditions. Furthermore, we calculated forward and backward climate velocities based on the mean annual temperature. These metrics can be useful inferences about species conservation. Our results indicate that almost all of the endangered mammals in the Leuser Ecosystem will occur in the area with threats to local populations and sites. Different conservation strategies should be performed in the areas likely to present different threats toward mammal species. Habitat restoration and long-term population monitoring are needed to support conservation in this mega biodiversity region.