Surveying, monitoring, and mitigating human disturbance impacts on Thai forest birds

Despite being covered by a relatively good protected area network; Thailand still shows issues in protecting is very rich biodiversity. The causes are to be found in the fact that threatened species only occupy a small percentage of available habitats. It became then imperative to determine where target species are located, what their actual status is and what habitat they prefer in order to guarantee their long-term survival and protection. This type of investigation becomes even more urgent as several threatened species occur either at the edges or outside protected areas in what is now a human-dominated landscape. As a consequence, successful conservation/management can only be achieved by coordinate the work of both government, non-government, & local people. In the end, long-term monitoring is needed as natural systems are dynamic and threats from humans are both short-term and long-term, particularly from climate change.

    The research goal of the umbrella is to provide information useful for short-term and long-term biodiversity management with a specific focus on forest birds inhabiting both protected areas and their surrounding human-dominated matrix. We aim to demonstrate basic principles of biodiversity management through three example projects covering: 1) basic surveys to understand distributions, habitats and population status of key species, primarily focusing on the highly-threatened Sundaic Galliformes inhabiting the biodiversity hotspot areas of Southern Thailand 2) working with local and government stakeholders particularly at the boundaries of protected areas to understand and manage globally threatened species and reduce potential conflicts with people and finally, focusing on the status and distribution of green peafowl in Thailand as the species has shown high adaptability to farmland where it often incur in conflict with local farmers. In the end, 3) how to conduct long-term monitoring to understand natural population dynamics and the threats from climate change to ensure that key biodiversity is protected for the long-term and that problems can be anticipated and managed before population declines become irreversible, by focusing on long-term changes in nest survival and nest predators of tropical forest birds in Thailand.

    The project framework has been developed over the example of the management failure of the small remaining Gurney’s Pitta (Hydrornis gurneyi), which had a viable Thai population 30 years ago but is now effectively extinct in the country, to understand how information can be used to avoid such failures in the future. Learning from this case we provide three studied where data for biodiversity management can be collected. These management principles include: 1) understanding distribution and habitat preferences, 2) management of biodiversity, balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders at the edges of protected areas, and 3) long-term monitoring, to understand population trends to understand short-term and long-term threats. Achieving these three primary aspects of biodiversity management will be implemented: 1) basic surveys and species distribution, 2) to conflict resolution/cooperative management for reducing conflict between people and wildlife and 3), long-term monitoring to assess short-term and long-term threats to wildlife populations. Data will be collected following standard wildlife surveys and monitoring protocols.