Wildlife corridors could offer new hope for orangutans

Orangutan populations could be better protected with wildlife corridors

Researchers from Cardiff University, University of Adelaide, NGO HUTAN, and Sabah Wildlife Department have been looking at ways to improve wildlife corridors in Borneo as a new method of protecting the endangered orangutan.

According to the researchers, more than 80 per cent of the primate’s habitat has been destroyed in the past 20 years due to demand for agricultural land, leaving the remaining forest fragmented, isolating orangutans from one another and resulting in a major threat to their survival.

The study highlights that establishing wildlife corridors that connect fragmented protected areas will allow animals to move freely from one territory to another. This will be beneficial to gene diversity, as it will minimise the negative impact of inbreeding caused by animals being forced to live in small, isolated territories.  

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Vital tropical wildlife corridors identified on maps in a new study

February 2014: A scientific team from the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) in Massachusetts have created maps of habitat corridors connecting protected areas in the tropics. The aim is to identify those areas that will become vital routes for the distribution of flora and fauna as climate change and human spread into the forests affect native populations. 

Climate change and deforestation are changing tropical ecosystems, isolating organisms in protected areas that will change along with the climate, and therefore threatening their survival. Nearly every animal and plant species requires travelling some distance for nutrition, reproduction and genetic diversity, but few conservation or climate mitigation strategies take the connections between conserved lands into account. These habitat corridors are essential for longer-term biodiversity conservation.

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