Limited carbon and biodiversity co‐benefits for tropical forest mammals and birds

Abstract

The conservation of tropical forest carbon stocks offers the opportunity to curb climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and simultaneously conserve biodiversity. However, there has been considerable debate about the extent to which carbon stock conservation will provide benefits to biodiversity in part because whether forests that contain high carbon density in their aboveground biomass also contain high animal diversity is unknown. Here, we empirically examined medium to large bodied ground-dwelling mammal and bird (hereafter "wildlife") diversity and carbon stock levels within the tropics using camera trap and vegetation data from a pantropical network of sites. Specifically, we tested whether tropical forests that stored more carbon contained higher wildlife species richness, taxonomic diversity, and trait diversity. We found that carbon stocks were not a significant predictor for any of these three measures of diversity, which suggests that benefits for wildlife diversity will not be maximized unless wildlife diversity is explicitly taken into account; prioritizing carbon stocks alone will not necessarily meet biodiversity conservation goals. We recommend conservation planning that considers both objectives because there is the potential for more wildlife diversity and carbon stock conservation to be achieved for the same total budget if both objectives are pursued in tandem rather than independently. Tropical forests with low elevation variability and low tree density supported significantly higher wildlife diversity. These tropical forest characteristics may provide more affordable proxies of wildlife diversity for future multi-objective conservation planning when fine scale data on wildlife are lacking.

High Carbon Stock forests provide co‐benefits for tropical biodiversity

“…Across a pantropical network of sites, Beaudrot et al (2016) and mammal occupancy in a certified forest reserve in Malaysian Borneo, despite adopting a comparable methodology to the present study. Contrasting findings may be attributed to spatial variability in hunting pressure.…”

“…While an increasing number of studies are recognising the importance of finescale assessments (e.g. Beaudrot et al, 2016;Magnago et al, 2015;Sollmann et al, 2017), most information on biodiversity co-benefits is derived from global-and national-scale studies that demonstrate overreliance on coarse-grained, secondary data sources. Carbon data are typically derived from global maps (e.g.…”

Trade‐offs between carbon stocks and biodiversity in European temperate forests

“…The carbon-biodiversity relationship may also vary across taxonomic groups (Di Marco et al, 2018;Ferreira et al, 2018;Lecina-Diaz et al, 2018). Even in the tropics, most research to date has focused on either vertebrates (Beaudrot et al, 2016;Deere et al, 2018;Sollmann et al, 2017), or tree species richness only (Cavanaugh et al, 2014;Magnago et al, 2015;Sullivan et al, 2017), while research comparing the fine-scale carbon-biodiversity relationship across groups of organisms remains rare (Ferreira et al, 2018). This is understandable, given the inherent costs of collecting field-based data for multiple taxonomic groups (Bustamante et al, 2016).…”

“…Finally, although the carbon-biodiversity relationship is often assumed to be linear (Beaudrot et al, 2016;Deere et al, 2018;Sullivan et al, 2017), thresholds could exist along the carbon stock gradient, meaning that a slight change in forest carbon stocks could cause disproportionate biodiversity loss (Evans et al, 2017;Sasaki, Furukawa, Iwasaki, Seto, & Mori, 2015). Such thresholds have been identified for a range of anthropogenic gradients (Li, Xu, Zheng, Taube, & Bai, 2017;Magnago et al, 2015;Sasaki et al, 2015), including carbon stocks in tropical forests (Ferreira et al, 2018).…”

Payments for adding ecosystem carbon are mostly beneficial to biodiversity

“…In Brazilian rain forests the association was clear in human disturbed plots but not in old-growth forests that varied in carbon density [10]. Many studies report weak, non-existing or conflicting trends within the study areas [11][12][13][14][15].…”