Gopalasamy Reuben Clements

This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on February 15, 2021 - February 21, 2021. We have only 10 years left! The intergovernmental panel on climate change predicts this is the amount of time we have left to implement change before a global temperature rise of 1.5°C becomes irreversible. If we want to have a cooler future, sacrificing more forests for urban development is no longer a viable option.

Conservation implications and future scenarios Certification schemes for sustainable agriculture (e.g., the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil—RSPO; https://www.rspo.org) have traditionally focused on identifying well-conserved areas (e.g. primary forests), or endangered species within production landscapes. However, within the study area in the Llanos region, none of these features are present, or are only present in places far from the study area.

Mammal diversity assessments based on DNA derived from invertebrates have been suggested as alternatives to assessments based on traditional methods; however, no study has field-tested both approaches simultaneously. In Peninsular Malaysia, we calibrated the performance of mammal DNA derived from blowflies (Diptera: Calliphoridae) against traditional methods used to detect species.