Justin Moat - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Justin Moat

The Harapan Rainforest in the Indonesian province of Jambi, Sumatra is one of the few effectively... more The Harapan Rainforest in the Indonesian province of Jambi, Sumatra is one of the few effectively protected areas in the lowlands of Sumatra. It is a former logging concession which has been leased for 99 years by the RSPB in collaboration with their Indonesian partner, Burung Indonesia. As part of the lease agreement, the area needs to be managed and re-vegetated by the RSPB. In the past the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew) has helped to provide some of the botanical background for this project.
The project’s primary purpose was to map the remaining vegetation of the project area, provide input and recommendations for the restoration and carbon capture at the site.

The pine rocklands of the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) are rich in species and home to threaten... more The pine rocklands of the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) are rich in species and home to threatened and endemic plants and animals. These forests are quite similar in structure to the Southern Florida pine rocklands; however, the dominant pine tree is the endemic Caribbean pine (Pinus caribaea var. bahamensis). The Caribbean pine trees in TCI are being attacked by the pine tortoise scale (PTS), Toumeyella parvicornis, a non-native pest insect. Little information about recent distribution and genetics of this pine is currently available, and is urgently needed for conservation and management of this species. M. Sanchez’s MPhil/PhD research project started in 2008 alongside the Pine Recovery Project (PRP), a TCI Government funded initiative to combat the PTS. This poster presents the findings of the mapping work undertaken during the first phase of the PRP, which consisted of mapping the TCI pine rocklands. Since 2008, fieldwork and remote sensing were carried out by the authors on th...

The Harapan Rainforest in the Indonesian province of Jambi, Sumatra is one of the few effectively... more The Harapan Rainforest in the Indonesian province of Jambi, Sumatra is one of the few effectively protected areas in the lowlands of Sumatra. It is a former logging concession which has been leased for 99 years by the RSPB in collaboration with their Indonesian partner, Burung Indonesia. As part of the lease agreement, the area needs to be managed and re-vegetated by the RSPB. In the past the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew) has helped to provide some of the botanical background for this project. The project’s primary purpose was to map the remaining vegetation of the project area, provide input and recommendations for the restoration and carbon capture at the site. Outcomes and activities Within the very short time frame this ambitious project has been a great success with outcomes in science, public outreach and testing of new techniques and technologies. The main activities were: • To map the vegetation of the project area from satellite imagery and fieldwork data • To run a ...

PLOS ONE, 2015

Plants provide fundamental support systems for life on Earth and are the basis for all terrestria... more Plants provide fundamental support systems for life on Earth and are the basis for all terrestrial ecosystems; a decline in plant diversity will be detrimental to all other groups of organisms including humans. Decline in plant diversity has been hard to quantify, due to the huge numbers of known and yet to be discovered species and the lack of an adequate baseline assessment of extinction risk against which to track changes. The biodiversity of many remote parts of the world remains poorly known, and the rate of new assessments of extinction risk for individual plant species approximates the rate at which new plant species are described. Thus the question 'How threatened are plants?' is still very difficult to answer accurately. While completing assessments for each species of plant remains a distant prospect, by assessing a randomly selected sample of species the Sampled Red List Index for Plants gives, for the first time, an accurate view of how threatened plants are across the world. It represents the first key phase of ongoing efforts to monitor the status of the world's plants. More than 20% of plant species assessed are threatened with extinction, and the habitat with the most threatened species is overwhelmingly tropical rain forest, where the greatest threat to plants is anthropogenic habitat conversion, for arable and livestock agriculture, and harvesting of natural resources. Gymnosperms (e.g. conifers and cycads) are the most threatened group, while a third of plant species included in this study have yet to receive an assessment or are so poorly known that we cannot yet ascertain whether they are threatened or not. This study provides a baseline assessment from which trends in the status of plant biodiversity can be measured and periodically reassessed.

Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, Jan 17, 2015

Extent of Occurrence (EOO) is a key metric in assessing extinction risk using the IUCN Red List c... more Extent of Occurrence (EOO) is a key metric in assessing extinction risk using the IUCN Red List categories and criteria. However, the way in which EOO is estimated from maps of species' distributions is inconsistent between assessments of different species, and between major taxonomic groups. It is often estimated from the area of mapped distribution, but these maps often exclude areas of unsuitable habitat in idiosyncratic ways and are not created at the same spatial resolutions. We assessed the impact on extinction risk categories of applying different methods for estimating EOO for 21763 species of mammals, birds and amphibians. Overall, we found that the percentage of threatened species requiring downlisting to a lower category of threat, taking into account other Red List criteria under which they qualified, spanned 11-13% for all species combined (14-15% for mammals, 7-8% for birds and 12-15% for amphibians) depending on the method used. Extrapolating from birds for missin...

Journal of East African Natural History, 2008

GIS Unit, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2007

Chorology, taxonomy and ecology of the floras of …, 1998

kewgardens.org

1. Web Master, ESRI(UK) Ltd, 23 Woodford Road, Watford, WD1 1PB (jgower@esriuk.com) 2. GIS Unit, ... more 1. Web Master, ESRI(UK) Ltd, 23 Woodford Road, Watford, WD1 1PB (jgower@esriuk.com) 2. GIS Unit, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 3AB, UK (J.Moat@rbgkew. org.uk) 3. Lecturer in Geographic Information Systems, Department of Geomatic ...

As part of its conservation work in areas such as Madagascar and Cameroon, the GIS unit at the Ro... more As part of its conservation work in areas such as Madagascar and Cameroon, the GIS unit at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has developed the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in making rapid conservation assessments. These applications assist Kew staff to make better informed species conservation status assessments, such as International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) ratings, based not only on herbarium and field data, but also on up to date vegetation maps, physical and climatic conditions and known threats. This article gives an overview of the work of the South-East Asia Section at Kew, and reviews the algorithms used by the GIS unit which are relevant to the Malaysian Plant Red Data Project.

The map of vegetation domains drawn by HUMBERT (1955) and the more recent vegetation cover map of... more The map of vegetation domains drawn by HUMBERT (1955) and the more recent vegetation cover map of FARAMALALA (1988, 1995), produced from satellite images, are accepted as reflecting the broad vegetation zones of Madagascar. These maps have been superimposed on maps of the geology and protected areas, and analysed using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) techniques. The species composition of the

Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, Jan 19, 2015

The IUCN Sampled Red List Index (SRLI) is a policy response by biodiversity scientists to the nee... more The IUCN Sampled Red List Index (SRLI) is a policy response by biodiversity scientists to the need to estimate trends in extinction risk of the world's diminishing biological diversity. Assessments of plant species for the SRLI project rely predominantly on herbarium specimen data from natural history collections, in the overwhelming absence of accurate population data or detailed distribution maps for the vast majority of plant species. This creates difficulties in re-assessing these species so as to measure genuine changes in conservation status, which must be observed under the same Red List criteria in order to be distinguished from an increase in the knowledge available for that species, and thus re-calculate the SRLI. However, the same specimen data identify precise localities where threatened species have previously been collected and can be used to model species ranges and to target fieldwork in order to test specimen-based range estimates and collect population data for...

Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, Jan 19, 2015

There is increased evidence that incorporating evolutionary history directly in conservation acti... more There is increased evidence that incorporating evolutionary history directly in conservation actions is beneficial, particularly given the likelihood that extinction is not random and that phylogenetic diversity (PD) is lost at higher rates than species diversity. This evidence is even more compelling in biodiversity hotspots, such as Madagascar, where less than 10% of the original vegetation remains. Here, we use the Leguminosae, an ecologically and economically important plant family, and a combination of phylogenetics and species distribution modelling, to assess biodiversity patterns and identify regions, coevolutionary processes and ecological factors that are important in shaping this diversity, especially during the Quaternary. We show evidence that species distribution and community PD are predicted by watershed boundaries, which enable the identification of a network of refugia and dispersal corridors that were perhaps important for maintaining community integrity during pa...

Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, Jan 22, 2004

The latitudinal gradient in species richness is a pervasive feature of the living world, but its ... more The latitudinal gradient in species richness is a pervasive feature of the living world, but its underlying causes remain unclear. We evaluated the hypothesis that environmental energy drives evolutionary rates and thereby diversification in flowering plants. We estimated energy levels across angiosperm family distributions in terms of evapotranspiration, temperature and UV radiation taken from satellite and climate databases. Using the most comprehensive DNA-based phylogenetic tree for angiosperms to date, analysis of 86 sister-family comparisons shows that molecular evolutionary rates have indeed been faster in high-energy regions, but that this is not an intermediate step between energy and diversity. Energy has strong, but independent effects on both species richness and molecular evolutionary rates.

The Harapan Rainforest in the Indonesian province of Jambi, Sumatra is one of the few effectively... more The Harapan Rainforest in the Indonesian province of Jambi, Sumatra is one of the few effectively protected areas in the lowlands of Sumatra. It is a former logging concession which has been leased for 99 years by the RSPB in collaboration with their Indonesian partner, Burung Indonesia. As part of the lease agreement, the area needs to be managed and re-vegetated by the RSPB. In the past the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew) has helped to provide some of the botanical background for this project. The project’s primary purpose was to map the remaining vegetation of the project area, provide input and recommendations for the restoration and carbon capture at the site. Outcomes and activities Within the very short time frame this ambitious project has been a great success with outcomes in science, public outreach and testing of new techniques and technologies. The main activities were: • To map the vegetation of the project area from satellite imagery and fieldwork data • To run a ...

PLOS ONE, 2015

Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, Jan 17, 2015

Journal of East African Natural History, 2008

GIS Unit, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2007

Chorology, taxonomy and ecology of the floras of …, 1998

kewgardens.org

Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, Jan 19, 2015

Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, Jan 22, 2004

Quaternary Science Reviews, 2015

Lomas – ephemeral seasonal oases sustained by ocean fogs – were critical to ancient human ecology... more Lomas – ephemeral seasonal oases sustained by ocean fogs – were critical to ancient human ecology on the desert Pacific coast of Peru: one of humanity’s few independent hearths of agriculture and “pristine” civilisation. The role of climate change since the Late Pleistocene in determining productivity and extent of past lomas ecosystems has been much debated.
Here we reassess the resource potential of the poorly studied lomas of the south coast of Peru during the long Middle Pre-ceramic period (c. 8,000 – 4,500 BP): a period critical in the transition to agriculture, the onset of modern El Niño Southern Oscillation (‘ENSO’) conditions, and eustatic sea-level rise and stabilisation and beach progradation.
Our method combines vegetation survey and herbarium collection with archaeological survey and excavation to make inferences about both Preceramic hunter-gatherer ecology and the changed palaeoenvironments in which it took place. Our analysis of newly discovered archaeological sites – and their resource context – show how lomas formations defined human ecology until the end of the Middle Preceramic Period, thereby corroborating recent reconstructions of ENSO history based on other data.
Together, these suggest that a five millennia period of significantly colder seas on the south coast induced conditions of abundance and seasonal predictability in lomas and maritime ecosystems, that enabled Middle Preceramic hunter-gatherers to reduce mobility by settling in strategic locations at the conﬂuence of multiple eco-zones at the river estuaries. Here the foundations of agriculture lay in a Broad Spectrum Revolution that unfolded, not through population pressure in deteriorating environments, but rather as an outcome of resource abundance.