Affiliations 

  • 1 Borneo Futures, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam; ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia. Electronic address: emeijaard@gmail.com
  • 2 Wildlife Impact, PO Box 31062, Portland, OR 97231, USA
  • 3 Borneo Futures, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam; HUTAN-Kinabatangan Orang-utan Conservation Programme, Sandakan, Sabah, Malaysia
  • 4 Research Centre in Evolutionary Anthropology, and Palaeoecology, School of Natural Sciences and Psychology, Liverpool John Moores University, Byrom Street, Liverpool, L3 3AF, UK; Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • 5 ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
  • 6 Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103, Leipzig, Germany; German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Deutscher Platz 5e, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
Curr Biol, 2018 11 05;28(21):R1241-R1242.
PMID: 30399343 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.09.052

Abstract

A recent report, published by the Government of Indonesia with support from the Food and Agricultural Organization and Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative, states that orangutan populations (Pongo spp.) have increased by more than 10% in Indonesia from 2015 to 2017, exceeding the government target of an annual 2% population increase [1]. This assessment is in strong contrast with recent publications that showed that the Bornean orangutan (P. pygmaeus) lost more than 100,000 individuals in the past 16 years [2] and declined by at least 25% over the past 10 years [3]. Furthermore, recent work has also demonstrated that both Sumatran orangutans (P. abelii) and the recently described Tapanuli orangutan (P. tapanuliensis) lost more than 60% of their key habitats between 1985 and 2007, and ongoing land use changes are expected to result in an 11-27% decline in their populations by 2020 [4,5]. Most scientific data indicate that the survival of these species continues to be seriously threatened by deforestation and killing [4,6,7] and thus all three are Critically Endangered under the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.