Predicting Hotspots and Prioritizing Protected Areas for Endangered Primate Species in Indonesia under Changing Climate

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Primates play an essential role in human life and its ecosystem. However, Indonesian primates have suffered many threats due to climate change and altered landscapes that lead to extinction. Therefore, primate conservation planning and strategies are important in maintaining their population. We quantified how extensively the protected areas overlapped primate hotspots and how it changes under mitigation and worst-case scenarios of climate change. Finally, we provide protected areas recommendations based on species richness and land-use changes under the worst-case scenario for Indonesian primate conservation planning and management options. ABSTRACT: Indonesia has a large number of primate diversity where a majority of the species are threatened. In addition, climate change is conservation issues that biodiversity may likely face in the future, particularly among primates. Thus, species-distribution modeling was useful for conservation planning. Herein, we present protected areas (PA) recommendations with high nature-conservation importance based on species-richness changes. We performed maximum entropy (Maxent) to retrieve species distribution of 51 primate species across Indonesia. We calculated species-richness change and range shifts to determine the priority of PA for primates under mitigation and worst-case scenarios by 2050. The results suggest that the models have an excellent performance based on seven different metrics. Current primate distributions occupied 65% of terrestrial landscape. However, our results indicate that 30 species of primates in Indonesia are likely to be extinct by 2050. Future primate species richness would be also expected to decline with the alpha diversity ranging from one to four species per 1 km(2). Based on our results, we recommend 54 and 27 PA in Indonesia to be considered as the habitat-restoration priority and refugia, respectively. We conclude that species-distribution modeling approach along with the categorical species richness is effectively applicable for assessing primate biodiversity patterns.