Abstract
Forest ownership is considered as vital for sustainable management of forest and its associated biodiversity. The Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015 reported an increasing rate of privately owned forests on a global scale. However, deforestation was found to be very active in privately owned hill forest areas of Malaysia. Three forest reserves and three adjacent private forests from Penang State was purposively chosen as this state has been experiencing a quick and radical changes due to urban expansion over the last three decades. In this study variation in biodiversity were measured using community structure of both vascular plants and avifauna species along selected micro environmental variables. Finally implications for conservation were proposed considering the current state of deforestation in private hill forest (PHF). Plant community and avifauna analysis revealed that government hill forest areas (GHF) were more diverse and healthier than PHF, also rich with higher evenness. Species richness between GHF and PHF showed significant difference in plant species (p < 0.05) but not for avifauna. Avifauna diversity analysis recorded higher abundance of birds in PHF and finally appeared as buffer service provider for avifauna diversity in GHF reserves. But the current rate of deforestation in PHF is 1.4% annually. Thus any alteration to hill forest cover (land development activities) should be banned immediately with intensive care to the PHF through co-management. Moreover human activities inside the GHF should also be controlled to conserve the remnant species of the island as conspicuous disturbance were also found inside GHF.
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Acknowledgements
We are thankful to the support of TWAS-USM fellowship for funding the whole PhD study of the first author as this study has been conducted as a part of his PhD research. We would like to thank School of Biological Sciences, USM for the technical and logistic support. We are grateful to USM through its Research University Grant. We would like to express gratitude to S. M. Edzham and Mr. Mohamad Syafiq Johari of the School of Biological Sciences, USM, Malaysia, for their immense assistance during the field data collection. We express sincere appreciation to IDEAWILD for donating scientific instruments for this study. We acknowledge the Jabatan Perhutanan Semenanjung Malaysia and Penang State Forestry Department for giving permission to carry out field work at reserved forests in Penang. Finally we like to thank Mrs. Farah Sharmin for her cordial proof reading service.
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Masum, K.M., Mansor, A., Sah, S.A.M. et al. Effect of differential forest management on biodiversity in a tropical hill forest of Malaysia and implications for conservation. Biodivers Conserv 26, 1569–1586 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-017-1318-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-017-1318-8