The forests of Borneo have among the highest biodiversity and also the highest forest loss rates on the planet.

Habitat loss is the greatest threat to biodiversity in Borneo, and to anticipate and combat its effects it is important to predict the pattern of loss and its consequences. Borneo is a region of extremely high biodiversity from which forest is being lost faster than in any other. The little-known Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi) is the top predator in Borneo and is likely to depend critically on habitat connectivity that is currently being rapidly lost to deforestation. We modeled the effects of landscape fragmentation on population size, genetic diversity and population connectivity for the Sunda clouded leopard across the entirety of Borneo. We modelled the impacts of land use change between the years 2000, 2010 and projected forwards to 2020. We found substantial reductions across all metrics between 2000 and 2010: the proportion of landscape connected by dispersal fell by approximately 12.5% and the largest patch size declined by around 15.1%, leading to a predicted 11.4% decline in clouded leopard numbers. We also predict that these trends will accelerate greatly towards 2020, with the percentage of the landscape being connected by dispersal falling by about 57.8%, the largest patch size falling by around 62.8% and the predicted clouded leopard population falling by 62.5% between 2010 and 2020. We predicted that these large declines in clouded leopard population size and connectivity will also substantially reduce the genetic diversity of the remaining clouded leopard population.

The Sunda clouded leopard is vulnerable to forest loss and fragmentation. Conservation of this species requires spatially explicit evaluations of the effects of landscape patterns on genetic diversity, population size and landscape connectivity.

Averting the biodiversity crisis requires closing a gap between how humans tend to behave, individually and collectively, and how we ought to behave—“ought to” in the sense of behaviors required to avert the biodiversity crisis. Closing that gap requires synthesizing insight from ethics with insights from social and behavioral sciences. This article contributes to that synthesis, which presents in several provocative hypotheses: (i) Lessening the biodiversity crisis requires promoting pro-conservation behavior among humans. Doing so requires better scientific understanding of how one’s sense of purpose in life affects conservation-relevant behaviors. Psychology and virtue-focused ethics indicate that behavior is importantly influenced by one’s purpose. However, conservation psychology has neglected inquiries on (a) the influence of one’s purpose (both the content and strength of one’s purpose) on conservation-related behaviors and (b) how to foster pro-conservation purposes; (ii) lessening the biodiversity crisis requires governance—the regulation of behavior by governments, markets or other organization through various means, including laws, norms, and power—to explicitly take conservation as one of its fundamental purposes and to do so across scales of human behaviors, from local communities to nations and corporations; (iii) lessening the biodiversity crisis requires intervention via governance to nudge human behavior in line with the purpose of conservation without undue infringement on other basic values. Aligning human behavior with conservation is inhibited by the underlying purpose of conservation being underspecified. Adequate specification of conservation’s purpose will require additional interdisciplinary research involving insights from ethics, social and behavioral sciences, and conservation biology.

Social influence impacts individuals’ behavior through norms – the perceived appropriateness of behaviors – and social referents, whose behavior is copied by others. Interventions using social influence may help promote conservation-friendly behaviors. We explored how perceptions are influenced by descriptive norms (what people do) and social referents (who does it) in relation to livestock management in Kenya. By presenting participants with vignettes describing different livestock management scenarios, we explored how two norms (‘high’ vs. ‘low’ standards of livestock management) and three social referents (‘neighbor,’ ‘leader,’ ‘father’) influence participants’ perceptions of aspects of livestock management. More senior social referents and ‘high’ standard norms were associated with greater impact on perceived importance of livestock management behaviors. Age also had an effect, with higher perceived importance and greater effect of norm treatment in younger respondents. Encouraging social seniors to model desired behavior may be a possible strategy for conservation behavioral interventions.

Context: The efficient and effective design of protected areas is a fundamental challenge in landscape ecology, focusing on how spatial patterns of habitat influence conservation outcomes. This has sparked debate about the relative importance of habitat area versus connectivity in maintaining populations across fragmented landscapes. Objectives: We evaluate the relative importance of habitat area and connectivity by comparing counterfactual scenarios for landscape configuration on Borneo. We examine how habitat area and connectivity influence Sunda clouded leopard population size and genetic diversity across scenarios and dispersal abilities. Methods: We compared 28 landscape scenarios on Borneo, incorporating combinations of core areas and movement corridors. We modelled population size and genetic diversity across five dispersal thresholds, using spatially explicit genetic simulations, to assess how area and connectivity influence conservation outcomes. Results: Our analysis reveals a strong, disproportionate relationship between habitat area and population size and genetic diversity. Even when controlling for overall extent, landscapes that protect larger areas consistently provide superior conservation outcomes. Corridors showed minimal impact, becoming effective only at the highest dispersal thresholds. Habitat area emerged as the primary driver of conservation success, challenging assumptions about the importance of connectivity and highlighting the complex interactions between landscape configuration and species mobility. Conclusions: Our findings reinforce the fundamental importance of habitat area for biodiversity conservation, while suggesting that conservation initiatives based on connectivity may have limitations, particularly when corridors are relatively long and narrow, or exceed species’ dispersal abilities. While connectivity remains a valuable conservation tool in fragmented landscapes, our results indicate that expanding core habitat areas should be the primary focus, with corridor investments strategically targeted to specific cases.