Scientists have started to debate the long-held notion that conserving so-called “umbrella species” — typically charismatic megafauna — offers the best opportunities to protect ecosystems and the rest of their wild inhabitants. We see this in a new study published in the journal Biological Conservation titled “Selecting umbrella species as mammal biodiversity indicators in tropical forest,” which focuses on the 2.6 million hectare Leuser Ecosystem in Sumatra, the last place on Earth where four classic umbrella species — orangutans, tigers, rhinoceroses, and elephants — are still found together in the wild.
The traditional idea goes like this: If species such as tigers and orangutans are protected, then all the smaller taxa beneath them enjoy protection as well. That approach still holds, but the authors of the study argue that smaller species — in this case Sunda clouded leopards and Sambar deer, as well as amphibians and invertebrates — are in fact better umbrella indicators because they tend to be found in areas with greater levels of species richness and ecological function.
As important as these “less charismatic” species are, there are several problems with the debate over broadening the definition of umbrella species.
As someone who has spent over a decade fundraising and doing fieldwork to survey and protect wildlife, and to develop ecotourism in Sumatra and Cambodia to get local community buy-in for conservation efforts, I can attest that charismatic megafauna are essential for habitats, particularly “protected areas,” to survive in Southeast Asia. It is surely no coincidence that the presence of these four charismatic species is why the Leuser Ecosystem, and the rest of its forest denizens, still exists.
A friend and I founded a small NGO called Habitat ID, and our first project was in Virachey National Park in northeastern Cambodia. At the time we started in 2012, it was the Kingdom’s largest national park but deemed a “paper park” — a term often used to describe protected areas that exist on maps but lack real protections. In this case poachers flooded into Virachey over the borders from Vietnam and Laos and from within Cambodia itself. The park was considered hopeless because its topography made it nearly impossible to patrol, and there were also allegations of mismanagement.
But an important question lingered over Virachey: Did it contain tigers?
Tigers had not yet been declared extinct in Cambodia (that happened in 2016), but at the time we held out hope that some of the big cats remained in the park. Having done my doctoral work studying the animist spirit mountains that form a pantheon along the Cambodia-Laos border, an area that had never been surveyed — and seeing that forest-smothered expanse of mountains from the panoramic Phnom Veal Thom Grasslands — I was willing to believe it was possible that a few tigers hung on there.
We held various fundraisers — actual in-person parties, as well as outreaches through online platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. We explained the vast remoteness to potential donors, and soon funding came through to buy camera traps, batteries, and protective cases, and provide money to pay the guides and porters (we paid for our own flights for this survey project, which spanned six years, and never earned a salary from it).
Tigers were never uncovered, but we did find a lost population of wild elephants; they hadn’t been confirmed in the park for well over a decade when we camera-trapped a herd of 17 in 2017. A paper about our elephant records appeared in The Cambodian Journal of Natural History, and today, largely thanks to our work searching for tigers, the long-established British NGO Fauna & Flora International is working in Virachey on a variety of programs, researching and protecting everything from frogs to the large-antlered muntjac to gibbons. Their involvement is set to be long term and to benefit the entire Virachey ecosystem.
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None of this would likely have happened had Habitat ID not gone looking for tigers who, unfortunately, weren’t there. Tigers, even in their absence, provided conservation investment, benefitting less-charismatic species.
Another case in point comes from Sumatra, the focus of the new study. Numerous conservation NGOs work in the famous Leuser Ecosystem, striving to preserve the Sumatran elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, and orangutan species that coexist there and nowhere else, so we never felt the need to piggyback on whatever they were working on. Instead Habitat ID centered on a neglected landscape in a mountain range south of Lake Toba called the Hadabuan Hills. With just four camera traps, we quickly confirmed the presence of Sumatran tigers and Malayan tapirs.
After that we fundraised for a larger expedition; because of our quick tiger records, the funding came in and we launched successive expeditions. Today the People Resources Community and Forests foundation supports an ambitious conservation program in the Hadabuan Hills — again, because we went looking for a tiger — and that time, found.
This endeavor, which is today expanding under PRCF’s stewardship, is working not only protect the obscure area’s tigers, but also other species listed as critically endangered by the IUCN such as helmeted hornbills and Sunda pangolins, as well as endangered species such as the Malayan tapirs, Sunda clouded leopards, marbled cats, Siamang gibbons, and everything “beneath” them on the conservation radar.
Again, it took a charismatic megafauna species to make this happen. And this is only our work.
Around the world charismatic megafauna attract money for conservation. The millions of dollars required to pay rangers to patrol, remove snares, and combat illegal logging and agricultural encroachment are not going to be raised by advertising the need to save deer, hog badgers, and wriggly worms, as important as they are to an ecosystem and as accurate as they may be as overlooked indicators of ecosystem health. Clouded leopards are beautiful animals, but it’s doubtful they could pull in the tens of millions of dollars desperately needed in besieged critical landscapes like the Leuser. On the contrary, donors piled in millions of dollars to protect Leuser’s “big four” within the last few years alone. Without them, the ecosystem would almost certainly suffer severe neglect.
These umbrella species also motivate action against one of the most serious threats to all wildlife and their forest habitats: infrastructure development in form of roads, dams, and palm oil plantations. When development plans are announced (or even unannounced, as is the case with the thousands of miles of “ghost roads” carving up Asia’s forests), there has to be a call to action in an attempt to halt them. Such was the case with the Tapanuli orangutan in Sumatra’s Batang Toru Ecosystem, designated as a new species in an effort to draw attention to a Chinese-funded dam project that would level much of forest landscape. While that designation of a new charismatic megafauna species has not stopped the dam — or the construction of a gold mine in the area, either — it has forced the government to take a closer look at what is going on in this ecologically important region. The outcome remains uncertain; but the matter is, at least, very much on the conservation and government radar.
Other cases are easy to find. In Thailand it’s largely believed that camera-trap images of a tigress with six young cubs in Mae Wong National Park in 2017 stopped or postponed the construction of a large hydroelectric dam that would have had devastating effects on the ecosystem and its wildlife. Kaziranga National Park in India exists because it’s home to a highly successful (if controversial) conservation program to protect its astounding population of 2,400 Indian one-horned rhinos; the park is also home to tigers, elephants, and plethora of other species. Many more protected areas in countries across Asia follow similar patterns.
Exciting news: Recent camera trap footage shows the presence of a new female tiger in Mae Wong National Park. Learn more about what this means for tigers: https://t.co/aJJ67gOiQr pic.twitter.com/5hKKSW3yW1
— World Wildlife Fund (@World_Wildlife) June 29, 2021
And megafauna umbrella species have an oversized ecological impact. Protection and even reintroduction of umbrella species such as leopards in India and wolves in Yellowstone National Park in the United States have been proven to be scientifically successful, and highly so.
In his 2021 book Leopard Diaries, Sanjay Gubbi writes: “The kingly mammal, a symbol of a healthy ecosystem, effectively helps in the conservation of smaller, lower-profile predators as well as other species that live in and make up its home range,” and he lists jungle cats, rusty-spotted cats, civets, four-horned antelopes, chinkara, pangolins, and porcupines among the beneficiaries of the presence of leopards (who are certainly considered “charismatic megafauna” in Sri Lanka and increasingly in Thailand’s Kaeng Krachan National Park, one of the Indochinese leopard’s final strongholds). Gubbi explains that leopards are superb seed dispersers — much more effective than often-cited primates, as leopards have home ranges nearly 10 times that of the primates of India. As such, roaming leopards keep forests healthy and even expand them.
Likewise, the wolves of Yellowstone, reintroduced in 1995, have had a transformative impact on the ecosystem, essentially saving the park’s ecology. By keeping the elk population in check, wolves have enabled riparian forests to regrow, allowing fish and amphibians to flourish in landscapes that had been denuded by the explosion in herbivore populations that thrived when the wolves had been hunted to extinction. The elk that the wolves don’t kill are fearful of the apex predators’ presence and don’t breed as much, allowing willow trees to grow unmolested again, which has helped beaver populations bounce back, with a complex cascading effect of benefits to all manner of smaller species.
The same thing happened in southern India when leopards were reintroduced, writes Gubbi: “The elimination of leopards ‘had created a landscape of fearlessness,’ where herbivores browse freely, impacting local vegetation. However, as soon as the large predators were reintroduced the area began to regain its vegetation, as the carnivores controlled where the herbivores browsed, bringing back a balance in the entire ecosystem.”
Umbrella species also inspire the public. Tourists from around the world fly to places like Sabah, Kalimantan, Sumatra, Thailand, Nepal, India, and many more countries specifically because they want to have a chance to see orangutans, tigers, rhinos, and elephants. The authors of the study would do well to ask the guesthouse owners, jungle guides, and protected area officials in places like Bukit Lawang or Ketambe in Sumatra, the Kinabatangan River Wildlife Sanctuary in Sabah, or Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan if they think tourists would fly from halfway across the world and spend money on their services if they didn’t have a shot at seeing orangutans and other large species. Locals need tourism money, and it’s the megafauna that draws international tourists in.
Finally, a new study in the journal Science argues that conservation does work, and umbrella species are a big reason why that’s true. Titled “The positive impact of conservation action,” the authors posit, among other things, that the establishment of protected areas is key to long-term conservation success. Relevant to the case for focusing on megafauna, the authors write: “Even when conservation interventions didn’t work for the species or ecosystem that they were intended to benefit, other species either often unintentionally benefited, or we learned from the result, ensuring that our next project or conservation action would be successful.”
At the very least, smaller species are not neglected by the emphasis on megafauna, at least in the sense that efforts are made to protect the large natural habitats needed for megafauna to live in the wild, and this is especially true in Asia. From the protection of hawksbill sea turtles in Bangladesh to the preservation of fishing cats across Asia’s dwindling wetlands to the last rhinoceros in Java, a strong focus on the preservation of charismatic megafauna will continue to play in vital role in overall conservation well into the future.
A veteran conservationist once put it to me bluntly: If the forest doesn’t have tigers or other big animals, then it’s shit. Most conservation scientists would disagree with that, but donors, activists and ecotourists probably won’t. And without them on board first, we may never get around to protecting everything else.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
