Chris Margules

University of Indonesia | UI · Department of Mathematics

Regular assessment of progress on the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is crucial for achieving the goals by 2030 yet such assessments often require extensive resources and data. Here, we describe a method using performance auditing as a novel approach for assessing the implementation of SDGs that would be useful for countries...

A new development model has recently emerged in Eastern Cameroon: privately-operated artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), financed largely by Chinese actors. This paper examines how these actors have impacted the formalization of ASM in the country, focusing on the case of the gold-rich Bétaré Oya region. Here, Chinese companies lease artisanal...

Indigenous Dayak Iban customary perspective on sustainable forest management, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Biodiversitas 23: 424-435. Borneo is the third-largest island in the world, is rich in biodiversity and has diverse unique ecosystems. However, deforestation and land tenure conflicts continue to threaten the indigenous people who rely on fores...

Biological and ecological information on the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis) remains limited. This study was designed to analyze the demographic parameters and build a growth model of the Tapanuli orangutans to help guide policy in developing a conservation program for them. Data were collected from tapanuli orangutans that were directly o...

Conflicting policies relating to the management of multi-sectoral, multi-level and multi-actor forest uses often result in ineffective policy implementation. Methods for assessing policy coherence, however, are limited and often require an extensive evidence base which is not always available. In Indonesia, this has often led to conflicts between g...

We report on the results of a survey of the herpetofauna of West Bali National Park (Taman Nasional Bali Barat in Indonesian, hereafter TNBB) that was carried out in 2015. The survey also included other taxa and the motivation for it was to identify a species or group of species that could be used as indicators of management success for Protected A...

The human footprint (HF) was developed to measure of the impact of human activities on the environment. The human footprint has been found to be closely related to the vulnerability of protected areas around the world. In Indonesia, as nature conservation is still seen as hindering economic development, it is especially important to assess the huma...

Tropical rainforests are among the most important ecosystems on earth. After Brazil, Indonesia has the second-largest tropical forest area in the world. Since the 1970s, Indonesia's forests have decreased from covering 87% to 50% of its land area. With the ever-increasing pressures from economic and human development, it appears likely that much of...

Fifty years have elapsed since the first publication of Ambio. Throughout this period, fundamental changes have occurred in societal attitudes to biodiversity conservation. Ambio has published numerous papers that have aligned with these new approaches. High citations numbers suggest that Ambio papers have had a significant impact on conservation s...

Major advances in biology and ecology have sharpened our understanding of what the goals of biodiversity conservation might be, but less progress has been made on how to achieve conservation in the complex, multi-sectoral world of human affairs. The failure to deliver conservation outcomes is especially severe in the rapidly changing landscapes of...

Habitat destruction is increasingly threatening the remaining primate habitat on the island of Java and populations of primates are declining as a result. Field surveys are commonly used to document the status of species such as primates and often serve as a preliminary step to long-term studies of primate populations. We trained university student...

Tropical forest landscapes are undergoing rapid transition. Rural development aspirations are rising, and land use change is contributing to deforestation, degradation, and biodiversity loss, which threaten the future of tropical forests. Conservation initiatives must deal with complex social, political, and ecological decisions involving trade-off...

Sulawesi is an important island for primates. All 17 species that are found there are endemics. The island also includes contact zones between species of macaques (genus Macaca) where hybrids may arise. Sulawesi continues to be deforested, especially in the lowlands most suitable for estate crops and other agricultural products. We carried out an i...

We propose an approach to studying the effectiveness of governance arrangements to deal with complexity in forest landscapes. Using a landscape approach and standard performance audit procedures, we (1) describe the interactions among multiple sectoral actors (2) evaluate the effectiveness of governance arrangements to deal with complexity in a for...

There is a global shift of forest management to local levels to better reconcile local livelihoods and biodiversity conservation. We argue that achieving such outcomes will require embedding science in landscape-scale management systems. We show that science can contribute to local learning and adaptation within landscape contexts. Complexity and p...

Integrated approaches to natural resource management are often undermined by fundamental governance weaknesses. We studied governance of a forest landscape in East Lombok, Indonesia. Forest Management Units (Kesatuan Pengelolaan Hutan or KPH) are an institutional mechanism used in Indonesia for coordinating the management of competing sectors in fo...

Decentralizing natural resource management to local people, especially in tropical countries, has become a trend. We review recent evidence for the impacts of decentralization on the biodiversity values of forests and forested landscapes, which encompass most of the biodiversity of the tropics. Few studies document the impact of decentralized manag...

Landscape approaches attempt to achieve balance amongst multiple goals over long time periods and to adapt to changing conditions. We review project reports and the literature on integrated landscape approaches, and found a lack of documented studies of their long-term effectiveness. The combination of multiple and potentially changing goals presen...

Recent decades have seen a rapid movement towards decentralising forest rights and tenure to local communities and indigenous groups in both developing and developed nations. Attribution of local and community rights to forests appears to be gathering increasing momentum in many tropical developing countries. Greater local control of forest resourc...

Land tenure in Indonesia is regulated by a complex combination of traditional, formal and informal arrangements. Legal ambiguity over land and natural resources has resulted in tenure insecurity, impacting livelihoods and perpetuating conflict. We reviewed land and forest laws in Indonesia and their effect on livelihoods and conflict and studied th...

The clearing and subsequent fragmentation of terrestrial ecosystems is commonly acknowledged as a major cause of the decline of biodiversity. These and other predicted responses to habitat fragmentation are derived from theory, which ecologists have tested with empirical approaches ranging from observations to experimental manipulations. These empi...

A framework was developed for the construction of an objectives hierarchy for multicriteria decisions in land use planning. The process began through identification of fundamental objectives; these were iteratively decomposed into a hierarchy of subobjectives until a level was reached at which subobjectives had measurable attributes. Values were de...

Initiatives to manage landscapes for both biodiversity protection and sustainable development commonly employ participatory methods to exploit the knowledge of citizens. We review five examples of citizen groups engaging with landscape scale conservation initiatives to contribute their knowledge, collect data for monitoring programs, study systems...

This paper draws on the literature on agroforestry, disaster risk reduction, and livelihoods of people on small islands as it applies to a community prospering in conditions of adversity in Kinali village on Siau Island, Indonesia. Siau Island produces between one-third and one-half of all nutmeg and mace exported from Indonesia. The Kinali communi...

We conducted an analysis of global forest cover to reveal that 70% of remaining forest is within 1 km of the forest’s edge, subject to the degrading effects of fragmentation. A synthesis of fragmentation experiments spanning multiple biomes and scales, five continents, and 35 years demonstrates that habitat fragmentation reduces biodiversity by 13...

Landscape approaches are widely applied in attempts to reconcile tradeoffs amongst different actors with conflicting demands on land and water resources. Key principles for landscape approaches have been endorsed by inter-governmental processes dealing with climate change mitigation and adaptation and biodiversity conservation. We review experienc...

Background/Question/Methods Experiments provide the strongest inferential framework to understand the dynamics of communities and species in response to habitat fragmentation – one of the greatest global threats to diversity. Experiments of large spatial scale and long temporal scale, like the Wog Wog experiment in Australia, allow us to disentan...

Setting aside protected areas is widely recognized as the most effective measurement to prevent species from extinction1-3. Accordingly, there has been a tremendous effort by governments worldwide in the creation of over 100,000 sites to achieve the 10% target proposed at the Fourth World Park Congress in 1992 in Caracas4. The main European Union e...

This Editorial presents the focus, scope and policies of the inaugural issue of Nature Conservation, a new open access, peer-reviewed journal bridging natural sciences, social sciences and hands-on applications in conservation management. The journal covers all aspects of nature conservation and aims particularly at facilitating better interaction...

The newly identified “Forests of East Australia” Global High Biodiversity Hotspot corresponds with two World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Ecoregions: the Eastern Australian Temperate Forests and Queensland’s Tropical Rain forests. The region contains more than 1,500 endemic vascular plants, meeting the criterion for global biodiversity significance, and mor...

Background/Question/Methods Habitat fragmentation is considered a major threat to biodiversity because it often results in smaller, more isolated populations with a higher risk of extinction. If these populations are connected by the migration of individuals, the assemblage comprises a metapopulation whose persistence is driven by the balance betw...

Background/Question/Methods Habitat loss and fragmentation continue to account for most biodiversity loss worldwide. Understanding how local communities on fragments disassemble can help to understand the community-level mechanisms that drive this loss. Fragmentation can alter local community structure via both stochastic processes (e.g. extincti...

There are few well-documented, general ecological principles that can be applied to pressing environmental issues. When they discuss them at all, ecologists often disagree about the relative importance of different aspects of the science's original and still important issues. It may be that the sum of ecological science is not open to universal sta...

Species extinctions and the deterioration of other biodiversity features worldwide have led to the adoption of systematic conservation planning in many regions of the world. As a consequence, various software tools for conservation planning have been developed over the past twenty years. These tools implement algorithms designed to identify conserv...

IntroductionMethods ResultsDiscussionSummaryReferences

The Wet Tropics World Heritage Area (WTWHA) in Far North Queensland is one of the world’s hotspots of rainforest biodiversity and is an area rich in cultural heritage, with surrounding landscapes important nationally for agriculture and tourism. Like many globally important UNESCO sites, the area is currently experiencing unprecedented rates of pop...

The demand for accurate forecasting of the effects of global warming on biodiversity is growing, but current methods for forecasting have limitations. In this article, we compare and discuss the different uses of four forecasting methods: (1) models that consider species individually, (2) niche-theory models that group species by habitat (more spec...

A major challenge for the science of ecology, to make it relevant, is to build a bridge between the local scale of reductionist science and the landscape scale of planning and decision making. This is, of course, the task that landscape ecology has set for itself. Planning for biodiversity conservation is a practice that illustrates the opportuniti...

We summarise the contributions of empiricists, modellers, and practitioners in this issue of Biodiversity and Conservation, and highlight the most important areas for future research on species survival in fragmented landscapes. Under the theme uncertainty in research and management, we highlight five areas for future research. First, we know littl...

We reviewed empirical data and hypotheses derived from demographic, optimal foraging, life-history, community, and biogeographic theory for predicting the sensitivity of species to habitat fragmentation. We found 12 traits or trait groups that have been suggested as predictors of species sensitivity: population size; population fluctuation and stor...

We present a brief introduction to current attempts to understand and mitigate the effects of fragmentation on species survival. We provide a short overview of the contributions of empiricists, modellers, and practitioners in this issue of Biodiversity and Conservation, which were initiated during a workshop held in Australia in February 2002 on th...

Theory and empirical evidence have long suggested that some species are extremely vulnerable to extinction because they have combinations of extinction promoting traits. However, ecologists have not considered whether the form of the relationship between traits is additive (not synergistic) or nonadditive (synergistic). We looked at how traits and...

Biodiversity has acquired such a general meaning that people now find it difficult to pin down a precise sense for planning and policy-making aimed at biodiversity conservation. Because biodiversity is rooted in place, the task of conserving biodiversity should target places for conservation action; and because all places contain biodiversity, but...

Biodiversity priority areas together should represent the biodiversity of the region they are situated in. To achieve this, biodiversity has to be measured, biodiversity goals have to be set and methods for implementing those goals have to be applied. Each of these steps is discussed. Because it is impossible to measure all of biodiversity, biodive...

The data needed to prioritize areas for biodiversity protection are records of biodiversity features - species, species assemblages, environmental classes - for each candidate area. Prioritizing areas means comparing candidate areas, so the data used to make such comparisons should be comparable in quality and quantity. Potential sources of suitabl...

The prioritization of places on the basis of biodiversity content is part of any systematic biodiversity conservation planning process. The place prioritization procedure implemented in the ResNet software package is described. This procedure is primarily based on the principles of rarity and complementarity. Application of the procedure is demonst...

An objective of biodiversity conservation activities is to minimize the exposure of biodiversity features to threatening processes and to ensure, as far as possible, that biodiversity persists in the landscape. We discuss how issues of vulnerability and persistence can and should be addressed at all stages of the conservation planning and implement...

Results are presented which prioritize areas for potential protection in Qubec on the basis of biodiversity considerations. These results are relevant to the ongoing public discussion in Qubec about designating new parks and refuges so that the province may fulfil its obligations to Canada's Endangered Spaces Campaign. The prioritization algorithm...

The effects of the experimental fragmentation of native eucalypt forest on the beetle community were tested, in a controlled, replicated, long-term experiment. In- cluded in our design were three fragment sizes, fragment edge and interior sites, and sites in the surrounding exotic pine plantation matrix. We followed 325 species through 28 sampling...

The effects of the experimental fragmentation of native eucalypt forest on the beetle community were tested, in a controlled, replicated, long-term experiment. Included in our design were three fragment sizes, fragment edge and interior sites, and sites in the surrounding exotic pine plantation matrix. We followed 325 species through 28 sampling pe...

A rapid biodiversity assessment ("BioRap") project identified candidate areas for biodiversity protection in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and provides an ongoing evaluation framework for balancing biodiversity conservation and other land use needs. Achieving a biodiversity protection target with minimum opportunity cost was an important outcome given tha...

Papua New Guinea (PNG) has an incredible variety of land and marine ecosystems, including many components of biodiversity that are unique in the world. PNG's land mass constitutes less than one percent of the world's land area, yet estimates suggest that the country has more than 5% of the world's biodiversity. PNG has been recognized therefore as...

A conservation planning study in Papua New Guinea (PNG) addresses the role of biodiversity surrogates and biodiversity targets, in the context of the trade-offs required for planning given real-world costs and constraints. In a trade-offs framework, surrogates must be judged in terms of their success in predicting general biodiversity complementari...

We describe three challenges for biodiversity planning, which arise from a study in Papua New Guinea, but apply equally to biodiversity planning in general. These are 1) the best use of available data for providing biodiversity surrogate information, 2) the integration of representativeness and persistence goals into the area prioritization process...

In this brief review we outline the contribution of Dr J. F. Lawrence to a major long-term field experiment in the southeast forests of NSW that examines the effect of habitat fragmentation on beetles. Dr J. F. Lawrence identified and curated the beetle fauna, which proved to be a significant and long-term commitment. The beetle data set has since...

The conservation of biological diversity has become one of the important goals of managing forests in an ecologically sustainable way. Ecologists and forest resource managers need measures to judge the success or failure of management regimes designed to sustain biological diversity. The relationships between potential indicator species and total b...

We strongly support initiatives to produce clear, efficient and practical goals for conservation to guide biodiversity planners and decision-makers in governments, agencies, conventions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). However, as things stand there is only limited consensus on global conservation priorities at international level. We bel...

The realization of conservation goals requires strategies for managing whole landscapes including areas allocated to both production and protection. Reserves alone are not adequate for nature conservation but they are the cornerstone on which regional strategies are built. Reserves have two main roles. They should sample or represent the biodiversi...

Theory suggests that species with particular traits are at greater risk of extinction than others. We assumed that a decline in abundance in forest fragments, com- pared to continuous forest, equated to an increase in extinction risk. We then tested the relationships between five traits of species and decline in abundance for 69 beetle species in a...

1. We tested for effects of habitat fragmentation in a controlled, replicated, field experiment, in south‐eastern Australia. Our experimental subjects were eight carabid beetle species, and the carabid assemblage (45 species). Monitoring was by pitfall trapping in forest remnants and in adjacent continuous‐forest controls. Remnants were of three si...

This paper responds to recent criticisms in Biological Conservation of heuristic reserve selection algorithms. These criticisms primarily concern the fact that heuristic algorithms cannot guarantee an optimal solution to the problem of representing a group of targeted natural features in a subset of the sites in a region. We discuss optimality in t...

Biodiversity conservation requires efficient methods for choosing priority areas for in situ conservation management. We compared three quantitative methods for choosing 5% (an arbitrary figure) of all the 10 × 10 km grid cells in Britain to represent the diversity of breeding birds: (1) hotspots of richness, which selects the areas richest in spec...

Accurate assessment of the relative conservation value of remaining areas of native vegetation is of primary importance to both land planners and land managers wishing to conserve the biodiversity of an area. Selection procedures aimed at identifying sets of patches for nature reserve networks stress the importance of retaining beta diversity (or d...

In the current environmental planning process, species, especially animal species, are often only considered as part of their respective biotopes. Consequently, about one third of the environmental impact planning projects in Germany completely lack any faunistic investigations, one third mention only some animal species, and only one third contain...

Current estimates of species extinctions indicate a sharp increase in extinction rates over the past two decades due to human-caused changes in habitats (Korneck & Sukopp 1988, Henle & Streit 1990). The most noticeable and probably most important change is the reduction of the amount of (semi-)natural habitat primarily due to the expansion of agric...