Identifying priority corridors and bottlenecks for three threatened large mammal species in the oil palm-dominated landscape of Peninsular Malaysia

Abstract

Agricultural landscape expansion and land development have disrupted wildlife habitats and movement pathways, limiting species’ access to critical resources. Identifying multispecies corridors across human-dominated landscapes is crucial to facilitate safe and unobstructed movement while minimizing negative interactions between humans and wildlife. We conducted a spatial distribution analysis to delineate potential high conflict areas and assess connectivity for the movement of focal species across Peninsular Malaysia. Using conflict data for the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), Malayan sun bear (Helarctos malayanus), and Malayan tiger (Panthera tigris) spanning an eight-year period (2013–2020), we predicted conflict risk distribution with MaxEnt. We then overlaid the resulting risk maps onto a unified resistance surface and predicted least-cost corridors between high conservation value (HCV) patches. We ranked these corridors by their ecological importance in a plantation landscape. We identified pinch point areas (bottlenecks) to denote locations most critical to species movement along the corridors. Our results suggested that potential high conflict areas were primarily located in eastern and southern Peninsular Malaysia. We identified 89 HCV core patches that were interconnected by 126 linkages. The mean length of the least-cost corridors was 13.41 km. Among the top 10 linkages ranked by centrality value, three crossed commercial plantations for <30 % of their length, and three were highly bottlenecked. This study underscores an ecological approach that considers human–wildlife conflict and habitat connectivity analysis for effective land use planning and critical zone designation.

Keywords

• Centrality
• Conflict area
• Core area
• Focal species
• Human-wildlife conflict
• Landscape connectivity