Nature Conservation Foundation

This article takes the case of the TAPESTRY project to look at how transformative change can be co-produced between local communities, researchers, community-based organisations and other actors. We lay out the process, challenges and tensions of doing co-produced research with marginalised people in marginalised environments affected by climate-related uncertainties and other crises. We reflect on the strategies needed to ensure that the voices of the most marginalised, who are at the forefront of climate uncertainty, are able to come to the fore and as far as possible in their own terms. We argue that despite significant challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic and in tackling existing power relations and social and gender inequities, co-produced research can help lift and give spaces to voices and perspectives that do not normally find their way to the realm of decision making. We demonstrate that critical transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary co-produced research can help reframe marginalised landscapes, and challenge dominant narratives and relations of power. While identifying concrete impacts on the ground can sometimes be difficult, co-production in itself can be a powerful agent of transformative change, leading to iterative learning and new insights among all participants. However, there are limits to how much can be achieved and scaled up in a conventional three- or four-year research project, calling for funders and donors to encourage longer-term engagements that enable local communities to take forward the research evidence and co-produced actions in locally appropriate ways.

This year marks the halfway point for multiple global environmental goals, including plans to nearly double the extent of area-based conservation to 30% of the world’s surface by 2030 (1). To date, this coordinated international effort has been inadequate to halt global biodiversity loss. A major but unaccounted-for cause of the shortfall between policy ambitions and real-world outcomes is the abandonment of conservation initiatives, including both informal abdication of resource management responsibilities and formal reversal of governing rules and boundaries (Fig. 1). The US$200 billion annually committed to conservation is spent on a wide diversity of conservation measures, increasingly beyond traditional national parks and other protected areas (PAs), including community-based conservation, eco-certification, and payments for ecosystem services (2). The scant monitoring of conservation abandonment, derived almost entirely from PAs, demonstrates widespread informal abandonment of management responsibilities (i.e., “paper parks” (e.g., 3, 4)) and formal abandonment through protected area downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD) (e.g., 5, 6).

Evidence for climate-change related alteration in distributions and ranges of forest trees is accumulating, but information from Asian tropical forests, particularly for threatened and endemic species, remains limited. Here, we examine landscape-level distribution-abundance patterns of 11 endemic and threatened tropical rainforest tree species in the Anamalai Hills and model their distribution and responses to future climate scenarios in the Southern Western Ghats (SWG), India. Six of the primarily low- and mid-elevation species were more abundant in protected reserves than forest fragments. Occurrence data from the Anamalais and SWG (N = 3004, range: 41-706 per species) were used to model distributions using maximum entropy (maxent) species distribution modelling in R. Maxent model performances indicated excellent fits for 9 of 11 species (AUC>0.90) with precipitation and temperature variables showing higher permutation importance. There was high interspecies variability in range size (197-12,221 km2) and niche width (0.04-0.50). Models of distribution under future climate in 2061-2080 predict range reductions in six species (including near-extinction for two species), increases for three species, and no substantial change for two species. Predicted southward and westward shifts in ranges and persistence in parts of the SWG indicate the importance of identifying and conserving micro-climatic zones or refugia to ensure the persistence of tree species under anticipated climate change.

1. ABSTRACT The future of species, particularly large-bodied birds, under climate threats, is increasingly unclear. Protected areas (PAs) can mitigate the impacts of global change, but are not completely immune. This makes it imperative to monitor populations even inside PAs. In the forests of the Western Ghats, three hornbill species are found—Malabar Grey Hornbill, Malabar Pied Hornbill and Great Hornbill. Kali Tiger Reserve, of Karnataka state, India, is known for its healthy hornbill populations, yet few systematic surveys have attempted to estimate their abundance, distributions and habitat affiliations. In this study, we documented the distributions of the three hornbills, estimated the density of Malabar Grey Hornbills and assessed correlates of hornbill encounter rates within the reserve. Malabar Grey Hornbills were the most abundant and widely distributed, found in all ranges of the reserve. Gund, Kadra and Phansoli had the most detections of Malabar Pied and Great Hornbills. Encounter rates of Malabar Grey Hornbill were positively correlated with food-tree stem density, those of Malabar Pied Hornbill negatively correlated with basal area, while those of Great Hornbill not significantly associated with any variable. Malabar Grey Hornbills had a density of 5.1 per km 2 (mean flock size = 1.2). While encounter rates of Malabar Pied and Great Hornbills were low, these numbers track the breeding season, when vocal activity is low and females are inside nests. This survey represents a partnership between researchers and the Karnataka forest department, aimed towards inculcating the collaborative spirit of research and monitoring.

Biodiversity drives stability in communities, allowing it to withstand environmental fluctuations without changes in aggregate properties like total abundance or biomass. We investigated biodiversity’s influence on two crucial population-level mechanisms governing abundance stability in mesopredatory coral reef fishes: ‘community asynchrony,’ where species populations fluctuate inversely over time, and ‘dominant stability,’ where highly abundant species with significant community contributions display minimal population fluctuations. Analyzing data from 83 reef fish communities across the Indian and Pacific Oceans over a decade, we found that community asynchrony, rather than dominant stability, primarily predicts community stability. Functional diversity, not taxonomic diversity, regulates this stability, emphasizing the role of niche differences in stabilizing communities. We highlight that community attributes that promote asynchronous population fluctuations, enhancing response diversity and tempering strong trophic interactions are vital for stabilizing mesopredatory reef fish communities in the face of global change.