Reconnecting the last wild landscapes of the Javan leopard

Large carnivores are vanishing from much of the world as their habitats shrink and human pressure grows. The Javan leopard is an exception. Fewer than 350 mature individuals are thought to survive, all of them on Java, and Ariyanto set out to learn how they hang on.

Using camera traps across several of the island’s national parks, he tracked which prey the leopard depends on. It favours areas with a wide variety of prey rather than relying on any single species. Conserving those varied prey communities, the research suggests, is essential to keeping populations viable where forests are broken up.

Conservation usually concentrates on protecting primary forest, the old-growth woodland that has never been cleared. Ariyanto’s models tell a different story. Leopards regularly use secondary and regenerating forest, the woodland that grows back after a disturbance, along with the production landscapes next to protected areas.

These recovering forests can serve as extra habitat and as corridors linking otherwise isolated patches. Forests long dismissed as second-rate may be doing much of the work of keeping the leopard alive.

Javan leopard (Panthera pardus melas) hunting in tropical rainforest,

Roads, railways and spreading cities are slicing Java’s remaining forest into ever smaller islands. For the leopard, that isolation blocks movement between populations and raises the risk of local extinction.

Reforestation could stitch some of these fragments back together. By mapping ecological corridors and the bottlenecks that break them, Ariyanto’s work pinpoints where restoring degraded land would reopen the most routes for one of Southeast Asia’s most endangered predators. It flags which areas to restore first, where the links between protected areas most need strengthening and where new roads or railways would do the most harm.

Java is an extreme version of a problem now found across the planet. As people reshape the land, large predators often appear outside protected areas, besides safely within them. Ariyanto’s supervisor, Prof Dr Tiejun Wang, sees the same shift. “A national park is no longer enough on its own,” he says. “The future of the leopard will be decided in the places where people already live and work.”

Andhika Chandra Ariyanto conducted his doctoral research in the Department of LIFE at the Faculty of ITC. His supervisors were Prof Dr Andrew K. Skidmore (ITC) and Prof Dr Tiejun Wang (Sun Yat-sen University, China). Today, he defends his thesis. His thesis, Spatially explicit conservation of the Javan leopard in human-dominated landscapes, is one of the most comprehensive spatial assessments of the species to date and offers practical guidance for conserving biodiversity in fast-changing tropical landscapes.