Why Hornbills?
Tuesday August 5, 2008
Are the hornbills becoming a rare sight?
By Meera Devi Daran (Source: The Star Online)
According to the IUCN-World Conservation Union Red List, the world’s main authority on globally threatened biodiversity, six of the 10 species found in Malaysia are classified as “near-threatened”, while the more elusive plain-pouched is currently considered to be “vulnerable”.
MNS senior conservation officer Yeap Chin Aik expresses his own words of caution: “Already one can only find hornbills in well-forested areas. If our forest cover continues to decline, the current ‘near-threatened’ species will become ‘vulnerable’, a very unenviable promotion.”
Monday April 26, 2010
How hornbills keep Asian rainforests healthy and diverse, an interview with Shumpei Kitamura
By Jeremy Hance (Source: Mongabay.com)
Hornbills are especially vital for Asia's fragmented rainforests because they are "mobile link" species according to Kitamura. This means that because hornbills are capable of soaring over cleared forest areas or plantations, traveling from one forest patch to another to spread seeds across fragmented ecosystems. Other frugivore species—such as rodents and primates—are less likely to link forest fragments since they may find human-caused barriers more difficult to cross.
"Mobile link species are considerably important in the regeneration of ecosystems that have been disturbed by linking disturbed sites to undisturbed source areas where new organic material may be brought into the perturbed site," Kitamura says, adding that "without thousands of animal species acting as seed dispersers, many plants would fail to reproduce successfully. Disruption of these complex services may leave large forest areas devoid of seedlings and younger age classes of trees, and thus unable to recover swiftly from human impact such as land clearing."
