Matthew Linkie

• PhD
• Consultant at Fauna and Flora International

Information on tropical Asian vertebrates has traditionally been sparse, particularly when it comes to cryptic species inhabiting the dense forests of the region. Vertebrate populations are declining globally due to land‐use change and hunting, the latter frequently referred as “defaunation.” This is especially true in tropical Asia where there is...

Protected areas (PAs) are central to sustainability targets, yet few evaluations explore outcomes for both conservation and development, or the trade‐offs involved. We applied counterfactual analyses to assess the extent to which PAs maintained forest cover and influenced well‐being across >31,000 villages in Sumatra and Kalimantan, Indonesia. We e...

Of all the ways human beings have modified the planet over the last 10,000 years, habitat loss is the most important for other species. To address this most critical threat to biodiversity, governments, non-governmental actors, and the public need to know, in near real-time, where and when habitat loss is occurring. Here we present an integrated ha...

Human-induced forest loss has had devastating impacts on biodiversity. Mammal populations in the tropics have been hit particularly hard by the resulting habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation, as well as by overhunting which often goes hand-in-hand. While declines in these populations are generally well documented, few studies offer a pathway...

Context Effective planning for protected areas and wildlife population management requires a firm understanding of the location of the species’ core habitat patches, the dispersal corridors connecting them, and the risk they face from key threats, notably deforestation. Objectives To quantify and map core habitat patches and dispersal corridors fo...

Primates are one of the most threatened groups of mammals. Understanding their patterns of population occurrence and abundance, especially in response to threats, is critical for informing conservation action. The crested black macaque Macaca nigra is the only Critically Endangered species of Sulawesi's seven endemic macaques. Little is known about...

This supplementary material contains 1) an estimated occupancy distribution map of the species across its entire native range (excl. satellite islands) 2) location of important populations with a detailed breakdown about these areas 3) cost benefit of camera trapping vs. foot surveys for surveying the species and 4) model selection tables

Habitat loss caused by deforestation is a global driver of predator population declines. However, few studies have focussed on these effects for mesopredator populations, particularly the cryptic and elusive species inhabiting tropical rainforests. We conducted camera trapping from 2009–11 and 2014–16, and used occupancy modelling to understand tre...

Most species of wild felids are threatened, but for many little is known about their status in the wild. For the cryptic and elusive Vulnerable Sunda clouded leopard Neofelis diardi , key metrics such as abundance and occupancy have been challenging to obtain. We conducted an intensive survey for this species on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. We...

Conserving large carnivores that live in close proximity to people depends on a variety of socio‐economic, political and biological factors. These include local tolerance toward potentially dangerous animals, efficacy of human–carnivore conflict mitigation schemes, and identifying and then addressing the underlying causes of conflict. The Leuser Ec...

Religious beliefs and spiritual connections to biodiversity have the potential to reduce animosity towards wildlife that might otherwise present a real or perceived threat to local people. Understanding this social dynamic can therefore be important for formulating locally-appropriate species-specific conservation strategies. Using semi-structured...

Interview transcript in English. (DOCX)

Interview transcript in Indonesia. (DOCX)

Clouded leopards are among Asia's most widely distributed felids, but also among its least known and most vulnerable. Clouded leopards occur in some of the most rapidly disappearing forests in the world, yet a comprehensive assessment of their status and habitat use is lacking, which in turn limits identification of their priority conservation need...

Clouded leopards are among Asia's most widely distributed felids, but also among its least known and most vulnerable. Clouded leopards occur in some of the most rapidly disappearing forests in the world, yet a comprehensive assessment of their status and habitat use is lacking, which in turn limits identification of their priority conservation need...

Co-occurrence between mesopredators can be achieved by differentiation of prey, temporal activity, and spatial habitat use. The study of mesopredator interactions is a growing area of research in tropical forests and shedding new light on inter-guild competition between threatened vertebrate species that were previously little understood. Here, we...

Tigers are critically endangered due to deforestation and persecution. Yet in places, Sumatran tigers (Panthera tigris sumatrae) continue to coexist with people, offering insights for managing wildlife elsewhere. Here, we couple spatial models of encounter risk with information on tolerance from 2386 Sumatrans to reveal drivers of human-tiger confl...

With the extirpation of tigers from the Indonesian island of Java in the 1980s, the endemic and Critically Endangered Javan leopard is the island’s last remaining large carnivore. Yet despite this, it has received little conservation attention and its population status and distribution remains poorly known. Using Maxent modeling, we predicted the l...

List of predicted suitable landscapes and land use characteristics in each landscape. Suitable landscapes were defined based on Maxent model outputs with logistic probabilities of 0.42 or greater. (PDF)

Contributors of Javan leopard records between 2008 and 2014. (DOCX)

The distribution of Javan leopard localities. For security reasons, Javan leopard localities were approximated in 100 km2 rectangles. (TIF)

The response curves of the probability of Javan leopard presence as a function of environmental variables. The curves show the mean response of the 10 replicates (red) and associated one standard deviation (grey area, error bar for categorical variables). (DOCX)

Tolerance may lessen when wildlife adversely impacts people. Models from psychology can help elucidate how people make judgements, why they act accordingly, and whether beliefs and norms influence support for policy and intervention. Working in a globally important region for tigers, we estimated hunting prevalence for this endangered species and t...

Illegal wildlife trade represents a major threat to biodiversity. Recent wildlife consumption trends across Asia have shown shifts in preference towards new species, such as Sunda pangolin, and increased volumes of consumption for longer-traded species, such as tiger. These trends are widely thought to be a result of the higher levels of wealth gen...

Managing populations of large carnivore species that are threatened yet in competition with each other presents a conservation challenge over which species to prioritise. We investigated interspecific competition between the Endangered tiger and two sympatric carnivore species (Near-Threatened leopard and Endangered dhole) in Malaysia. We used a sp...

Current levels of illegal wildlife trade for many in-demand species are unsustainable and place them at a heightened risk of extinction. While several Asian protected areas standout for their remarkable successes in tackling poaching, the threat continues nonetheless. We analyse a decade of law enforcement data from a Sumatran protected area to inv...

The unprecedented economic growth occurring across Southeast Asia is causing large tracts of rainforest to be logged, converted to plantations or fragmented by infrastructure development. It also opens up forest to poachers which, in combination, places acute pressure on the region’s large carnivores. Here, we focus on one of Malaysia’s three prior...

The government of Indonesia, which presides over 10% of the world's tropical forests, has set ambitious targets to cut its high deforestation rates through an REDD+ scheme (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation). This will require strong law enforcement to succeed. Yet, strategies that have accomplished this are rare and, alo...

[Extract] Dramatic losses of forest and biodiversity across the Asia-Pacific region are a great cause for concern. The region's tropical ecosystems are under immense pressures, be it from conversion to exotic plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia or intense demand for wildlife products in Vietnam and China. The fragmentation and disturbance of natu...

Aim Across the tropics, large‐bodied mammal species are threatened by rapid and widespread forest habitat conversion by either commercial logging or agricultural expansion. How such species use these habitats is an important area of research for guiding their future management. The tropical forest‐dwelling sun bear, Helarctos malayanus , is the lea...

The loss and fragmentation of substantial areas of forest habitat, in combination with rampant hunting, has pushed many of Southeast Asia’s megafauna species to the verge of extinction. However, the extent of these declines is rarely quantified, thereby weakening lessons learned and species-based management. This need not be the case as a prolifera...

High rates of deforestation are presumed to adversely affect large-bodied mammal populations across South-east Asia. Understanding how these species respond to deforestation is therefore important for their conservation, particularly for more cryptic species that have proved a challenge to enumerate. Here, we use an occupancy approach based on dete...

Asian tropical forests are being lost and the biodiversity they contain eroded at rates far higher than the background rates seen during the last few thousand years. Evidence from monitoring satellite imagery tells us that some countries in the region have lost double-digit percentages of forest cover in the last few decades, especially outside of...

Hunting is believed to threaten the survival of many important wildlife species in India. However, few studies have documented this threat because hunting is prohibited under the Indian law and is therefore conducted covertly. In this study, we interviewed community members of a conservation project, who were currently or had previously hunted wild...

Multidisciplinary approaches to managing seascapes are increasingly being recognized as best practice and therefore prioritized by conservation agencies. For most coastal areas the strengthening of customary marine tenure, rules and regulations should yield even greater biodiversity and livelihood benefits. Here, we present the conservation plannin...

The Coral Triangle Initiative is an ambitious attempt to conserve the marine biodiversity hotspot known as the Coral Triangle. However, the reef fauna in many nearby regions remains poorly explored and, consequently, the focus on the Coral Triangle risks overlooking other areas of high conservation significance. One region of potential significance...

Many tropical biodiversity projects seek to combine development and conservation goals. Here, we assess the performance of a revolving fund, established by Fauna & Flora International (FFI), in delivering sustainable and equitable benefits to coastal community livelihood groups and individuals while ensuring that it did no apparent harm to the envi...

Despite dating back over 400 years the relevance of traditional fisheries management in Aceh, Indonesia, still remains high. Aceh was, however, greatly affected by the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed an estimated 167,000 lives, including 14,000 fishermen and 59 of the 193 traditional marine leaders (Panglima Laot). This tragic loss...

1. Crop raiding by great apes is an emerging conservation issue across their range. It is important because it involves highly threatened species that can cause significant economic damage and be killed in retribution. Yet, to date, no quantitative study has sought to test possible solutions for preventing this form of human–wildlife conflict. 2. F...

Large carnivores living in tropical rainforests are under immense pressure from the rapid conversion of their habitat. In response, millions of dollars are spent on conserving these species. However, the cost-effectiveness of such investments is poorly understood and this is largely because the requisite population estimates are difficult to achiev...

1. Models have been devised previously that allow the estimation of abundance from detection data of unmarked individuals while accounting for imperfect detection, but these are restricted to models for discrete sampling protocols, i.e. replicated detection/non‐detection or count data. Furthermore, these models assume that the detections from each...

The proportion of sampling sites occupied by a species is a concept of interest in ecology and biodiversity conservation. Occupancy surveys based on collecting detection data along transects have become increasingly popular to monitor some species. To date, the analysis of such data has been carried out by discretizing the data, dividing the transe...

Little is known about interactions between the critically endangered Sumatran tiger Panthera tigris sumatrae and its prey because of the difficulties associated with detecting these species. In this study, we quantify temporal overlap between the Sumatran tiger and five of its presumed prey species from four study areas comprising disturbed lowland...

Monthly orangutan activity budgets expressed as percentage of overall activity budget. Social, nest building and playing were also recorded separately but later categorized as ‘Other.’ (PDF)

Monthly orangutan diet composition including cultivated and wild fruit species expressed as a percentage of overall feeding time. (PDF)

Deforestation is rapidly transforming primary forests across the tropics into human-dominated landscapes. Consequently, conservationists need to understand how different taxa respond and adapt to these changes in order to develop appropriate management strategies. Our two year study seeks to determine how wild Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) ada...

Research on the allocation of resources to manage threatened species typically assumes that the state of the system is completely observable; for example whether a species is present or not. The majority of this research has converged on modeling problems as Markov decision processes (MDP), which give an optimal strategy driven by the current state...

Deforestation rates in Sumatra are amongst the highest in the tropics. Lowland forests, which support the highest densities of orangutans, are particularly vulnerable to clearance and fragmentation because they are highly accessible. Consequently, many orangutans will, in the future, live in strictly or partially isolated populations. Whilst orangu...

With only 5% of the world's wild tigers (Panthera tigris Linnaeus, 1758) remaining since the last century, conservationists urgently need to know whether or not the management strategies currently being employed are effectively protecting these tigers. This knowledge is contingent on the ability to reliably monitor tiger populations, or subsets, ov...

Human-wildlife conflicts, such as crop-raiding, increase as people expand their agricultural activities into wildlife habitats. Crop-raiding can reduce tolerance toward species that are already threatened, whereas potential dangers posed by conflicts with large-bodied species may also negatively influence local attitudes. Across Asia, wild pigs and...

As the tropical deforestation crisis continues, innovative schemes are being developed to reduce this loss, such as the sale of forest carbon credit. Nevertheless, to address this ongoing and pervasive loss, governments, protected area managers and donors need to know where to invest their limited conservation resources for greatest success. At the...

Aim This study determines whether the establishment of tropical protected areas (PAs) has led to a reduction in deforestation within their boundaries or whether deforestation has been displaced to adjacent unprotected areas: a process termed neighbourhood leakage. Location Sumatra, Indonesia. Methods We processed and analysed 98 corresponding LANDS...

Human–carnivore conflict is considered to be a major conservation and rural livelihood issue because many carnivore species have been heavily persecuted due to elevated conflict levels with communities. To mitigate such conflicts requires a firm understanding of their underlying patterns. This situation is epitomized in Pakistan, where carnivore po...

Data from camera traps that record the time of day at which photographs are taken are used widely to study daily activity patterns of photographed species. It is often of interest to compare activity patterns, for example, between males and females of a species or between a predator and a prey species. In this article we propose that the similarity...

In situ conservation of tropical forests often requires restricting human use and occupancy within protected areas by enforcing regulations. However, law enforcement interventions that seek to prevent deforestation rarely have been evaluated. Conservationists increasingly recognize the need to measure the effectiveness of their interventions, using...

Debate in the 1930s about whether fishing cat Prionailurus viverrinus inhabited Sumatra effectively ceased in 1940 when one key reference stated that it did. No cogent reasons were given, but most subsequent secondary sources set the island within the species’s range. Several cautious authors stressing the lack of verifiable Sumatran records went l...

Independent evaluations of the impact and legacy of large donor-funded integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) are critically important but rarely undertaken. The India Eco-Development Project around Periyar Tiger Reserve (PTR-IEDP) in southern India received US$ 6.0 million, of which 43.2% was spent on community-based conservation...

Threatened species become increasingly difficult to detect as their populations decline. Managers of such cryptic threatened species face several dilemmas: if they are not sure the species is present, should they continue to manage for that species or invest the limited resources in surveying? We find optimal solutions to this problem using a Parti...

Many of the large, donor-funded community-based conservation projects that seek to reduce biodiversity loss in the tropics have been unsuccessful. There is, therefore, a need for empirical evaluations to identify the driving factors and to provide evidence that supports the development of context-specific conservation projects. We used a quantitati...

Tropical forests are becoming increasingly degraded and fragmented by logging, which can affect the survival of forest bird species in different ways. In this study, we present avifauna data collected from a monitoring programme in west-central Sumatra that set camera traps in three study areas with different habitat types, levels of degradation an...

Tropical mammals represent some of the most threatened species, but also the least known because they tend to be difficult to study. To objectively evaluate the conservation status of these species, standardized methods are urgently required. The sun bear Helarctos malayanus is a case in point: it is cryptic, difficult to detect and consequently cl...

Crop raiding can reduce farmers' tolerance towards wildlife. Despite higher human population densities in rural areas, and more rapid conversion of forest to farmland, much less is known about crop raiding in Asia than in Africa. Over 14 months, we identified perceived and actual crop pests, and their patterns of crop raiding from farmland in and a...

Conservation managers require accurate and timely information on the occurrence, size and viability of populations, but this is often difficult for cryptic species living at low densities over large areas. This study aimed to provide such information for tigers in the 36 400‐km ² Kerinci Seblat (KS) region, Sumatra, by identifying and assessing sub...

Protected area managers have limited resources and so need fine-scale information to decide where to focus their budgets for law enforcement and community outreach. This study used satellite imagery to map and analyse forest loss in an area that overlaps with Kerinci Seblat National Park, Sumatra, to identify areas most susceptible to illegal loggi...