Spatial Planning for Conservation, Sustainable Economic Development and Society (SPaCES Project)
Energy, Infrastructure & Waste
Food, Agriculture & Fisheries
Forest, Water & Soil
Livelihood, Tourism & Enterprise
The SPaCES Project
SPaCES provides Forever Sabah with cross-cutting services to its programs, projects and partnerships on as an as-needed basis.SPaCES current project is focusing on mapping and advocating for the protection of mangroves in Sabah. This project is focused on identifying current mangrove extents in Sabah, as well as identifying mangrove forest loss in the recent past. It also is focused on identifying current threats to existing mangrove ecosystems, and identifying degraded mangroves that need restoration. The overarching goal of this project is to try and protect all mangrove ecosystems in Sabah.
SPaCES
Project summary
SPaCES provides Forever Sabah with cross-cutting services to its programs, projects and partnerships on as an as-needed basis.
SPaCES current project is focusing on mapping and advocating for the protection of mangroves in Sabah. This project is focused on identifying current mangrove extents in Sabah, as well as identifying mangrove forest loss in the recent past. It also is focused on identifying current threats to existing mangrove ecosystems, and identifying degraded mangroves that need restoration. The overarching goal of this project is to try and protect all mangrove ecosystems in Sabah.
Safeguarding threatened mammal species habitat in Sabah.
Sabah is a globally renowned biodiversity hotspot and a stronghold for many threatened and endemic wildlife species. Sabah’s forests have been heavily degraded through decades of extensive extractive logging and large swaths of forests have been cleared for plantations and infrastructure development, threatening many species survival.
Through funding from The Woodspring Trust, we embarked on an ambitious mapping project to identify natural habitats for Sabah’s threatened wildlife, and assessed the extent of habitat at risk from oil palm, other monoculture plantations, infrastructure development and other threats.
Through collaborations with over fifteen local and international insitutues, encompassing NGOs, universities, government, and industry, we collated the largest location meta-datset for mammals in Sabah. We used these data, and developed an array of spatial data to model the distributions of 26 mammal species. We worked with data providers and other stakeholders to refine and enhance the distribution maps within natural habitat, also identifying areas important for connectivity/wildlife corridors. We overlaid these maps with protected areas, and used and/or developed a number of other maps that identified key threats to these widlife distributions - collectvely refered to as High Conservation Value (HCV) areas. Examples of threats included, further expansion of oil palm and industrial tree plantations, and the construction of proposed new roads, rail and highways. To assess the potential risk of hunting and poaching within these HCV areas, we also modelled accessability of forested areas for people to identify high risk areas.
The species maps, threat data and report of this work has been provided to the Sabah Forestry Department for inclusion in the States High Conservation Value (HCV) Screening Assessment, which is needed for Sabah’s jurisdictional process to achieve 100% sustianable palm oil under the RSPO by 2025. This study will be published in a number of open access forthcoming peer-reviwed manuscripts.
Species Distributions Workshop Attendees, in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah on the 13th December 2018.
A consolidated map of 26 mammal distributions in forested areas (called HCV1 areas in green), overlaid with protected areas (black cross hatch) and forest reserves (grey cross hatch) with planned roads upgrade of 2-lane to 4-lane highways (purple), new road developments (red), new railways (yellow and black line) and oil and gas pipeline (black line), with these cutting through HCV1 areas.
Map showing relative accessibility of HCV1 areas with red showing areas that are very accessible, orange being moderately accessible, and green being less accessible.
Identifying vulnerable mangroves for protection and restoration amid emerging threats.
There has been no accurate mapping of mangroves in Sabah. Estimates suggest there may be around 230,000 hectares of mangrove, with many not protected and under threat from fires, conversion to plantations, aquaculture farms, and infrastructure developments projects. Yet, mangroves are of immense value, acting as ‘bio-shields’ that buffer between the marine and terrestrial environments, and by providing essential habitat to an array of native fish, prawns, crabs, and many threatened bird and mammal species, such as the endangered and endemic proboscis monkey.
Through funding from The Woodspring Trust, SPaCES is using various remote sensing imagery and desk-top geospatial methods to quantify the extent of mangrove forest lost within the recent past (from 2005 to 2022); and, to identify the land use type developed on previously mangrove forested areas (i.e., to identify the industry sectors associated with this deforestation). Further, SPaCES is mapping the current extent of Sabah’s mangroves and is firstly identifying degraded areas that could be targeted for restoration. Secondly, SPaCES is identifying the extent of these mangroves in protected areas, in State lands (which may be a low hanging fruit for protecting additional mangroves), as well as within commercial forest reserves, and commercial land titles (i.e., areas potentially earmarked for oil palm and other plantations). Through this project we will advocate for full protection of mangroves in Sabah.
Preliminary map of Sabah’s mangrove and coastal forest ecosystems for the year 2014.
Map showing an example of Sabah’s unprotected mangrove forests (green) that is found along the north-west coast. These unprotected mangroves, in this area, span over 1,700 ha and are home to proboscis monkey and fire flies. These mangroves are next to the Kota Belud Bird Sanctuary (demarcated by purple cross hatch) and will be impacted by the construction of the Pan Borneo Highway (see red dotted line) in the near future.
Maps showing protected mangrove (light grey) and unprotected mangrove (in pink) in Pitas district (left map) and Tawau district (right map), with most of these areas threatened with large scale aquaculture farms.
SPaCES cross-cutting services to other Forever Sabah programs, projects and partnerships:
In recent years SPaCES has also had major involvement in a number of other Forever Sabah projects/areas of work. SPaCES involvement in these projects have been from a variety of international and local donors including UK-PACT and United Nations Development Program/GEF.
Humans Habitats Highways (HHH).
SPaCES has provided the mapping needs of Forever Sabah’s HHH project, which is part of a wider coalition (called Coalition 3H), who came together to share resources, and to engage more coherently and effectively in infrastructure planning and development in Sabah and Malaysia.
SPaCES provided various maps and developed various data in order to assess the potential impacts of the Pan Borneo Highway on mangroves, paddy fields, Bornean elephants and other wildlife, and on local Indigenous communities, and provided government alternative lower impact routes.
Map showing collared elephant data from Danau Girang Field Centre (DGFC) and field data from Forever Sabah’s CERT with the planned Pan Borneo Highway alignment (red and white dotted line), along with alternative lower impact alignments identified by Coalition 3H (yellow line and blue line). These alternative alignments were provided to the State government.
Map from the study “The socio-economic and cultural impacts of the Pan Borneo Highway (PBH) on Indigenous and local communities in Sabah” submitted to the journal PLOS ONE that assessed the potential impact of the PBH on communities using three width scenarios of 50m, 75m and 100m for planned highway alignments, and identified potentially impacted dwellings and community lands. It was estimated that from 65-93 villages will be impacted, and that 1,712-7,093 dwellings and 3,420-6,695 ha of community lands (e.g. paddy, oil palm smallholdings and rubber) may be lost to the PBH. Due to land tenure technicalities, many affected households may not get compensation for the loss of their homes and lands. The map above shows the number of dwellings that may be lost in the 75m scenario of the PBH and traditional lands of the Dusunic and Murutic Indigenous Groups.
Forever Segama: Mainstreaming Biodiversity in Catchment Management.
SPaCES also provides mapping for the Forever Segama project that aims to mainstream biodiversity conservation in river catchment management. This project is under the government Department of Drainage and Irrigation (DID).
SPaCES has led on the mapping aspects of this project that has included: mapping forest loss from 1996 to 2021 and identified companies responsible for this forest loss, mapping existing land use/land cover, riparian zones and identifying unprotected forests. Additionally, SPaCES identified future scenarios of forest protection and for reforestation needed to achieve legal compliance of riparian laws, and reforestation requirements under RSPO, given that Sabah is striving for 100% Jurisdictional RSPO certification. This project works with government, industry and communities to enhance forest protection and connectivity.
Map showing forest loss across three time periods, from 1995-2005 (green), from 2005-2014 (orange), and from 2014-2021 (red); overlaid with Totally Protected Areas and Production Forest extents (dark and light grey), and the Forever Sabah’s Intervention Zone boundaries.
Map showing existing forest in 2021 (green) that is outside of protected areas (grey) within the Segama catchment (pink line), and the Forever Sabah’s Intervention Zone boundaries.
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