Lian Pin Koh

National University of Singapore | NUS · Department of Biological Sciences

High forest low deforestation jurisdictions (HFLDs) contain many of the world’s last intact forests with historically low deforestation. Since carbon financing typically uses historical deforestation rates as baselines, HFLDs facing the prospect of future threats may receive insufficient incentives to be protected. We found that from 2002 to 2020,...

Protected areas (PAs) play a crucial role in biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation. How- ever, ineffective management can lead to biodiversity loss and carbon emissions from deforestation. To address this issue and explore viable solutions, we assessed the impact of PA establishment on avoided deforestation in 80 Southeast Asian P...

Carbon credits generated through jurisdictional-scale avoided deforestation projects require accurate estimates of deforestation emission baselines, but there are serious challenges to their robustness. We assessed the variability, accuracy, and uncertainty of baselining methods by applying sensitivity and variable importance analysis on a range of...

Despite the looming land scarcity for agriculture, cropland abandonment is widespread globally. Abandoned cropland can be reused to support food security and climate change mitigation. Here, we investigate the potentials and trade-offs of using global abandoned cropland for recultivation and restoring forests by natural regrowth, with spatially-exp...

Biodiversity conservation is increasingly being recognized as an important co-benefit in climate change mitigation programmes that use nature-based climate solutions. However, the climate co-benefits of biodiversity conservation interventions, such as habitat protection and restoration, remain understudied. Here we estimate the forest carbon storag...

Despite the looming land scarcity for agriculture, cropland abandonment is widespread globally. Abandoned cropland can be reused to support food security and climate change mitigation. Here, we investigate the potentials and trade-offs of using global abandoned cropland for recultivation and restoring forests by natural regrowth, with spatially-exp...

Abstract Large‐scale reforestation can potentially bring both benefits and risks to the water cycle, which needs to be better quantified under future climates to inform reforestation decisions. We identified 477 water‐insecure basins worldwide accounting for 44.6% (380.2 Mha) of the global reforestation potential. As many of these basins are in the...

Natural climate solutions (NCS) are an essential complement to climate mitigation and have been increasingly incorporated into international mitigation strategies. Yet, with the ongoing population growth, allocating natural areas for NCS may compete with other socioeconomic priorities, especially urban development and food security. Here, we projec...

Protected areas safeguard biodiversity, ensure ecosystem functioning, and deliver ecosystem services to communities. However, only ~16% of the world's land area is under some form of protection, prompting international calls to protect at least 30% by 2030. We modeled the outcomes of achieving this 30 × 30 target for terrestrial biodiversity conser...

Forest carbon projects can deliver multiple benefits to society. Within Southeast Asia, 58% of forests threatened by loss could be protected as financially viable carbon projects, which would avoid 835 MtCO2e of emissions per year from deforestation, support dietary needs for an equivalent of 323,739 people annually from pollinator-dependent agricu...

Protected areas (including other effective area-based conservation measures) are a cornerstone of biodiversity conservation. Many countries are increasingly committed to expanding protected area coverage to 30%, which requires an increase in global annual spending from $24b to ~$140b (between $103b and $177b). We find that by trading nature-based c...

The global COVID-19 pandemic has imposed restrictions on people's movement, work and access to places at multiple international, national and sub-national scales. We need a better understanding of how the varied restrictions have impacted wildlife monitoring as gaps in data continuity caused by these disruptions may limit future data use and analys...

The Convention on Biological Diversity’s post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework will probably include a goal to stabilize and restore the status of species. Its delivery would be facilitated by making the actions required to halt and reverse species loss spatially explicit. Here, we develop a species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric...

Short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) are a cryptic and iconic monotreme found throughout the continent of Australia. Despite observational records spanning many years aggregated in national and state biodiversity databases, the spatial and temporal intensity of sightings is limited. Although the species is of least conservation concern at...

The climate mitigation potential of urban nature-based solutions (NBSs) is often perceived as insignificant and thus overlooked, as cities primarily pursue NBSs for local ecosystem services. Given the rising interest and capacities in cities for such projects, the potential of urban forests for climate mitigation needs to be better understood. We m...

Carbon finance projects that protect tropical forests could support both nature conservation and climate change mitigation goals. Global demand for nature-based carbon credits is outpacing their supply, due partly to gaps in knowledge needed to inform and prioritize investment decisions. Here, we show that at current carbon market prices the protec...

Despite the outsized role of mangrove forests in sustaining biodiversity, ecosystem function, and local livelihoods, the protection of these vital habitats through blue carbon financing has been limited.¹,² Here, we quantify the extent of this missed conservation and financial opportunity, showing that the protection of ∼20% of the world’s mangrove...

Plant phenology is closely related to light availability as diurnal and seasonal cycles are essential environmental cues for organizing bio-ecological processes. The natural cycles of light, however, have been dramatically disrupted by artificial light at night (ALAN) due to recent urbanization. The influence on plant phenology of ALAN and its spat...

China’s decision to ban the trade and consumption of terrestrial wild animals, while controversial, is a viable response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The ban has implications that extend beyond safeguarding human health to also help combat illegal wildlife trade and protect threatened species.

Delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires balancing demands on land between agriculture (SDG 2) and biodiversity (SDG 15). The production of vegetable oils and, in particular, palm oil, illustrates these competing demands and trade-offs. Palm oil accounts for ~40% of the current global annual demand for vegetable oil as food, ani...

Biodiversity monitoring is key for developing informed solutions to the threats facing our environment, including habitat loss, increasing pollution, wildlife trafficking and climate change. Citizen science is increasingly used for collecting species observational data at wide spatial and temporal scales that are difficult and expensive to achieve...

As climate change continues to threaten human and natural systems, the search for cost-effective and practical mitigation solutions is gaining momentum. Reforestation has recently been identified as a promising nature-based climate solution. Yet there are context-dependent biophysical, financial, land-use and operational constraints to reforestatio...

Carbon finance projects that protect tropical forests could support both nature conservation and climate mitigation goals. Global demand for nature-based carbon credits is outpacing their supply, due partly to gaps in knowledge needed to inform and prioritize investment decisions. Here, we show that at current carbon market prices the protection of...

In the last 50 years, intensive agriculture has replaced large tracts of rainforests. Such changes in land use are driving niche-based ecological processes that determine local community assembly. However, little is known about the relative importance of these anthropogenic niche-based processes, in comparison to climatic niche-based processes and...

Mosquito breeding habitat identification often relies on slow, labour-intensive and expensive ground surveys. With advances in remote sensing and autonomous flight technologies, we endeavoured to accelerate this detection by assessing the effectiveness of a drone multispectral imaging system to determine areas of shallow inundation in an intertidal...

Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires rapid decarbonization and improved ecosystem stewardship. To achieve the latter, ecosystems should be prioritized by responsiveness to direct, localized action and the magnitude and recoverability of their carbon stores. Here, we show that a range of ecosystems contain ‘irrecoverable carbon’ that is vul...

Understanding causes of population change is critical for conservation. Quantifying these causes can be difficult, especially for hard to sample animals like marine vertebrates (e.g. pinnipeds). One solution is to investigate spatiotemporal differences in a species' body condition by measuring body size and mass. Collecting traditional morphologica...

Delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires balancing demands on land between agriculture (SDG 2) and biodiversity (SDG 15). The production of vegetable oils in general, and palm oil in particular, is perhaps the most controversial illustration of these trade-offs. Global annual demand for vegetable oil for food, animal feed and fu...

Innovation has the potential to enable conservation science and practice to keep pace with the escalating threats to global biodiversity, but this potential will only be realized if such innovations are designed and developed to fulfill specific needs and solve well‐defined conservation problems. We propose that business‐world strategies for assess...

The last decade has transformed the field of artificial intelligence, with deep learning at the forefront of this development. With its ability to 'self-learn' discriminative patterns directly from data, deep learning is a promising computational approach for automating the classification of visual, spatial and acoustic information in the context o...

If current trends continue, the tropical forests of the Anthropocene will be much smaller, simpler, steeper and emptier than they are today. They will be more diminished in size and heavily fragmented (especially in lowland wet forests), have reduced structural and species complexity, be increasingly restricted to steeper, less accessible areas, an...

Southeast (SE) Asia holds high regional biodiversity and endemism levels but is also one of the world's most threatened regions. Local, regional and global threats could have severe consequences for the future survival of many species and the provision of ecosystem services. In the face of myriad pressing environmental problems, we carried out a r...

The rise of palm oil as the world's most consumed vegetable oil has coincided with exponential growth in palm oil research activity. Bibliometric analysis of research outputs reveals a distinct imbalance in the type of research being undertaken, notably a disproportionate focus on biofuel and engineering topics. Recognizing the expansion of oil pal...

The rise of palm oil as the world’s most consumed vegetable oil has coincided with exponential growth in palm oil research activity. Bibliometric analysis of research outputs reveals a distinct imbalance in the type of research being undertaken, notably a disproportionate focus on biofuel and engineering topics. Recognising the expansion of oil pal...

Autonomous aerial robots provide new possibilities to study the habitats and behaviors of endangered species through the efficient gathering of location information at temporal and spatial granularities not possible with traditional manual survey methods. We present a novel autonomous aerial vehicle system—TrackerBots —to track and localize multipl...

The responses of birds to overflying remotely piloted aircraft (or drones) are poorly understood. While direct observations of behaviour can provide an understanding of wildlife response, this approach is unable to quantify the potential physiological responses of individuals. To do this, a dummy bird egg containing a microphone was substituted int...

The integration of Bayesian analysis into existing great ape survey methods could be used to generate precise and reliable population estimates of Bornean orang-utans. We used the Marked Nest Count (MNC) method to count new orang-utan nests at seven previously undocumented study sites in Sarawak, Malaysia. Our survey teams marked new nests on the f...

The relationship between beta-diversity and latitude still remains to be a core question in ecology because of the lack of consensus between studies. One hypothesis for the lack of consensus between studies is that spatial scale changes the relationship between latitude and beta-diversity. Here, we test this hypothesis using tree data from 15 large...

In this book, we introduce the use of drones for wildlife conservation. We provide a broad overview of when drone technology can be useful for wildlife conservation before going into the different types of drones that are available and the basic configuration of such systems. After this we discuss the various types of sensors that are being used to...

Spatial analysis reaches across all the subdisciplines of anthropology. A cultural anthropologist, for example, can use such analysis to trace the extent of distinctive cultural practices; an archaeologist can use it to understand the organization of ancient irrigation systems; a primatologist to quantify the density of primate nesting sites; a pal...

Field data collection by Citizen Scientists has been hugely assisted by the rapid development and spread of smart phones as well as apps that make use of the integrated technologies contained in these devices. We can improve the quality of the data by increasing utilisation of the device in-built sensors and improving the software user-interface. I...

Increasingly complex research questions and global challenges (e.g., climate change and biodiversity loss) are driving rapid development, refinement, and uses of technology in ecology. This trend is spawning a distinct sub‐discipline, here termed “technoecology.” We highlight recent ground‐breaking and transformative technological advances for stud...

Knowing how many individuals are in a wildlife population allows informed management decisions to be made. Ecologists are increasingly using technologies, such as remotely piloted aircraft (RPA; commonly known as “drones,” unmanned aerial systems or unmanned aerial vehicles), for wildlife monitoring applications. Although RPA are widely touted as a...

Global demands for agricultural and forestry products provide economic incentives for deforestation across the tropics. Much of this deforestation occurs with a lack of information on the spatial distribution of benefits and costs of deforestation. To inform global sustainable land-use policies, we combine geographic information systems (GIS) with...

Final meta-analytic model resulting from conditional averaging of the top 3 models. “Provisioning” and “Regulating” are levels of ecosystem services types compared against cultural services. “Revealed preference” and “Stated preference” are levels of valuation methods and compared against cost-based valuation methods. (TIF)

Predicted versus observed linear regressions for the top 3 models obtained through information theory. Predictions were generated based on a leave-one-out cross-validation procedure. β denotes the slope of the regression and R2 represents the proportion of the variance explained by the regression. (TIF)

The economic implications of deforestation in tropical forests from 2000 to 2012. Comparison of carbon emissions assessed at market prices plus loss of ES values (TEVm) minus gains of agricultural rents under scenario A (AR1). Values at the 2.5th percentile of the simulations are shown. (TIF)

The economic implications of deforestation in tropical forests from 2000 to 2012. Comparison of carbon emissions assessed at market prices plus loss of ES values (TEVm) minus gains of agricultural rents under scenario A (AR1). Values at the 97.5th percentile of the simulations are shown. (TIF)

Spatial distribution of the value of CO2 emissions from deforestation from 2000–2012 under social prices. Median values of the simulations are shown. (TIF)

Annual per-country net benefits and losses of converting tropical forests to agriculture for the years 2000–2012 compared to carbon emissions. This figure shows the result of deducting agricultural rents (AR) from the crops replacing forests under 4 different scenarios (A, B, C, and D with corresponding agricultural rents AR1, AR2, AR3, and AR4) to...

Spatial distribution of the value of CO2 emissions from deforestation from 2000–2012 under market prices. Median values of the simulations are shown. (TIF)

Annual per-country net benefits and losses of converting tropical forests to agriculture for the years 2000–2012 compared to total ecosystem services losses. This figure shows the result of deducting agricultural rents (AR) from the crops replacing forests under 4 different scenarios (A, B, C, and D with corresponding agricultural rents AR1, AR2, A...

Annual per-country net benefits and losses of converting tropical forests to agriculture for the years 2000–2012 compared to carbon emissions. This figure shows the result of deducting agricultural rents (AR) from the crops replacing forests under 4 different scenarios (A, B, C, and D with corresponding agricultural rents AR1, AR2, AR3, and AR4) to...

The economic implications of deforestation in tropical forests from 2000 to 2012. Comparison of carbon emissions assessed at social prices minus gains of agricultural rents under scenario B (AR2). The median values of the simulations are shown. (TIF)

The economic implications of deforestation in tropical forests from 2000 to 2012. Comparison of carbon emissions assessed at market prices plus loss of ES values (TEVm) minus gains of agricultural rents under scenario B (AR2). Values at the 2.5th percentile of the simulations are shown. (TIF)

The economic implications of deforestation in tropical forests from 2000 to 2012. Comparison of carbon emissions assessed at market prices plus loss of ES values (TEVm) minus gains of agricultural rents under scenario B (AR2). Median values of the simulations are shown. (TIF)

The economic implications of deforestation in tropical forests from 2000 to 2012. Comparison of carbon emissions assessed at social prices minus gains of agricultural rents under scenario A (AR1). The median values of the simulations are shown. (TIF)

The economic implications of deforestation in tropical forests from 2000 to 2012. Comparison of carbon emissions assessed at market prices plus loss of ES values (TEVm) minus gains of agricultural rents under scenario C (AR3). Values at the 2.5th percentile of the simulations are shown. (TIF)

The economic implications of deforestation in tropical forests from 2000 to 2012. Comparison of carbon emissions assessed at market prices plus loss of ES values (TEVm) minus gains of agricultural rents under scenario C (AR3). Values at the 97.5th percentile of the simulations are shown. (TIF)

The economic implications of deforestation in tropical forests from 2000 to 2012. Comparison of carbon emissions assessed at market prices plus loss of ES values (TEVm) minus gains of agricultural rents under scenario C (AR3). Median values of the simulations are shown. (TIF)

Oil palm expansion in insular Southeast Asia from 2010 (A) to 2014 (B). New oil palm conversions are typically in the vicinity of existing plantations. A generalized least-squares model of new conversion as a function of distance from plantation in 2010 presented a coefficient of –0.06 (p-value < 0.01), showing that occurrence of new conversion dec...

Semivariograms of top 3 ES meta-analytic models with highest support. Nonincreasing semivariance with distance denotes no problems of spatial autocorrelation in the residuals of the models. Top left, top right, bottom left: first, second, and third most supported models. (TIF)

The economic implications of deforestation in tropical forests from 2000 to 2012. Comparison of carbon emissions assessed at market prices plus loss of ES values (TEVm) minus gains of agricultural rents under scenario B (AR2). Values at the 97.5th percentile of the simulations are shown. (TIF)