AMHERST, Mass. — Research led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst is giving conservationists a precise picture of which habitats to target in their efforts to ensure that Southeast Asia's big cats —Bengal tigers, Indochinese leopards and Mainland clouded leopards —are saved from extinction.
It is no secret that these big cats are among the animals most threatened by deforestation, habitat fragmentation, climate change and, especially, poaching. Not only are these apex predators ecologically crucial keystone species whose loss threatens the stability of entire ecosystems, they also have deep cultural significance.
According to the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List Assessment for Myanmar, Bengal tigers, Indochinese leopards and Mainland clouded leopards are all facing regional extinction. There were only 22 tigers found in Myanmar in a two-year survey of one of the protected areas, and Indochinese leopards are found in only 11% of their historical range. Although the number of clouded leopards has not been estimated, of the 17 locations in Myanmar that were camera-trapped and surveyed for tigers between 1999 and 2002, only 10 had clouded leopards.
All three big cat species also share critical habitat areas within Myanmar's 114,000 square-kilometer Chindwin River Basin, which is home to 11 protected areas and 25 Key Biodiversity Areas.
As much as they have in common, Bengal tigers, Indochinese leopards and Mainland clouded leopards also differ markedly in the precise habitats that they require in order to thrive. "It's very difficult to figure out how to protect multiple species facing multiple threats," says Timothy Randhir, professor of environmental conservation at UMass Amherst and senior author of the paper, published recently in the Journal for Nature Conservation . "And adding to that the different kinds of landscapes each cat requires only increases the difficulty of finding a solution," he continued.
Randhir has spent the last two decades refining "population dynamics models," which take into account a wide range of variables including different climate projections, weather patterns, land use scenarios, physical and topographical characteristics, etc., to help predict where the most suitable habitats for large mammals will be in the coming years.
However, any model, even one as sophisticated as Randhir's, is only as good as its data, and this is where the paper's lead author, Theint Thandar Bol, who completed this research as part of her master's program at UMass Amherst, comes in.
Myanmar native Bol worked for the Wildlife Conservation Society's Myanmar program from 2015 until 2020. She helped set up camera traps to collect data on the big cats in some of the protected areas in the Chindwin Basin, one of the most critical hotspots and priority corridors in the Indo-Burma region.
"After Hla Naing, one of our co-authors who is now a graduate student at Oregon State University, left his master's program at UMass Amherst, he started the wildlife conservation intern program that motivated me to pursue wildlife conservation," says Bol, who notes that field conservation roles have historically been offered to women in Myanmar. "Naing opened many conservation opportunities for women in Myanmar."
With Bol's data and Randhir's modeling framework, the team was able to develop species distribution models to generate a series of precise maps showing exactly which areas will be most suitable for the big cats in the coming years.
The good news is that many of today's existing protected areas in the Chindwin Basin will continue to be critical in the future.
The less good news is that, if the big cats are going to have any future at all then they'll need more protection than what today's protected areas can offer.
"We need to extend our vision to habitat areas outside protected areas, which means we need to think about policies to change land use in the Chindwin Basin," says Randhir.
In particular, Bol points to the importance of connectivity for wildlife corridors—strips of land that can allow the cats to move through the landscape. "If we don't consider how to connect and conserve the areas that the big cats need," she says, "they will be even more intensively destabilized. And this will have catastrophic effects, both ecologically and culturally."
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