Conservation Ecology of Tropical Mammals

Conservation ecology of tropical mammals examines how forest structure, species interactions and human activities shape the persistence and recovery of mammalian biodiversity in tropical regions. Intensive logging, agricultural conversion and urban expansion have fragmented habitats, altered resource availability and disrupted ecological processes that underpin mammal communities. Yet selectively logged forests can retain significant conservation value if residual structures and functional composition are maintained, offering refugia and facilitating natural regeneration. Restoration efforts increasingly employ spatially explicit tools to prioritise degraded areas, integrating three-dimensional habitat characteristics with species occurrence data. Concurrently, socio-ecological research underscores the influence of Indigenous management practices and hunting rights on wildlife distributions, advocating for context-specific strategies. By linking energetic flows, community resilience and socio-cultural dimensions, conservation ecologists aim to balance biodiversity protection with sustainable land use, ensuring that tropical mammals persist amid escalating global change.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Empirical thresholds have been defined for categorising the conservation value of logged tropical forests, demonstrating that lightly logged sites (less than 30 percent biomass removal) retain near-intact functional composition and can recover under natural regeneration, whereas heavily degraded stands (over 68 percent removal) require active restoration measures. Complementing this, an energetics perspective reveals that logged forests may exhibit elevated resource consumption by mammals—up to 2.5-fold compared with old-growth—driven by increased food accessibility and palatability, with principal energy pathways maintaining high species diversity and redundancy. These findings challenge the notion that logged forests are uniformly degraded, highlighting their dynamic ecological functions and informing restoration priorities that reconcile timber production with mammalian biodiversity conservation.

Conservation Ecology of Tropical Mammals publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in conservation ecology of tropical mammals across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Biomass removal threshold: The proportion of above-ground plant mass extracted during logging, used to categorise forest degradation.

Ecosystem energetics: An integrative approach analysing energy flows and resource consumption across food pathways within ecological communities.

Occupancy model: A statistical method estimating the probability of species presence while accounting for imperfect detection.

LiDAR: Light Detection and Ranging, a remote sensing technology that maps three-dimensional forest structure using laser pulses.

Functional composition: The array and abundance of functional traits within a community that determine ecosystem processes and resilience.

References

1. Thresholds for adding degraded tropical forest to the conservation estate. Nature (2024).
2. Logged tropical forests have amplified and diverse ecosystem energetics. Nature (2022).
3. Socio-ecological factors shape the distribution of a cultural keystone species in Malaysian Borneo. npj Biodiversity (2023).
4. Maximizing the value of forest restoration for tropical mammals by detecting three-dimensional habitat associations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2020).