Indonesia’s peatlands experience frequent and intense wildfires, producing hazardous smoke with consequences for human health, yet there is a lack of research into adverse effects on wildlife. We evaluated the effects of smoke on the activity and energy balance of Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii) in a peat swamp forest at the Tuanan Research Station, Central Kalimantan. We collected behavioural data and urine samples from four adult flanged males before, during, and after wildfires between March 2015 and January 2016. During fires, particulate matter (PM10) concentrations were hazardous. Orangutans increased rest time during and after the smoke period, and decreased travel time and distance and increased fat catabolism post-smoke. The increase in post-smoke ketones was not related to changes in caloric intake and was likely due to an increase in energy expenditure, possibly related to immune response. Results show that wildfire smoke negatively affects orangutan condition, and sustained research is needed to assess the magnitude of the threat to the long-term viability of this Critically Endangered species.

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Primate conservation involves careful consideration of nonhuman primate species populations and threats to them; however, human livelihoods cannot be ignored and should be carefully understood in order to make a conservation initiative successful. Cohabitation of human and nonhuman primates is imperative to ensure a future for nonhuman primate species as the human population continues to grow; yet, conserving primates can have devastating consequences on human populations. Conservation biologists and primatologists will likely need to take into account detriment to the livelihoods of human populations surrounding nonhuman primate habitats. It is particularly important to be sensitive in situations where human communities are translocated from their homes, lose crops, or lose the use of land that had in the past been culturally and economically important to them in order to gain support for conservation programs and tolerance for nonhuman primates.

Higher education institutions have long played a key role in solving society's most pressing problems. However, as the scale and complexity of socio‐environmental problems has grown, there has been a renewed debate about the role that academic institutions should play in developing solutions and how institutional structures should be redesigned to encourage greater interdisciplinarity. In the following pages, we present a graduate student perspective on this debate. Specifically, we identify challenges facing interdisciplinary graduate student researchers and present a series of recommendations for how institutions can better prepare them to become the next generation of leaders in interdisciplinary, action‐oriented research focused on solving socio‐environmental problems.