The research, published in Ecology and Evolution, combined more than 26,000 camera-trap nights of continuous monitoring with a hierarchical multi-species occupancy model capable of extracting reliable information even for species that are so rare or cryptic that they are barely caught on camera. The study targeted a suite of globally threatened mammals for which ecological information remains extremely limited: the Critically Endangered Sunda pangolin, the Endangered hairy-nosed otter, large-spotted civet and long-tailed macaque, and the Vulnerable fishing cat and smooth-coated otter. Two more common species, the leopard cat and common palm civet, were included to represent the full mangrove mammal community and to strengthen inference for the rarer species through information sharing in the statistical model.

Peam Krasop and Koh Kapik, located in Koh Kong province in southwest Cambodia, harbor one of the largest and densest remaining mangrove forests in Southeast Asia. The protected areas together cover roughly 357 square kilometers of fringe, back and mixed mangrove, along with adjacent Melaleuca swamp forest and semi-evergreen forest. The study focused on approximately 150 square kilometers of this coastal and riverine habitat. Local communities depend heavily on fishing, crabbing and historically charcoal production, and the landscape faces pressures from overexploitation of wildlife and forest products, land clearance, illegal hunting and fishing. This mosaic of relatively intact habitat interspersed with human activity made the area an ideal natural laboratory for examining how threatened mammals respond to varying levels of human disturbance.

Between February 2017 and December 2023, the research team deployed between 20 and 30 cameras each year, at an average of 111 days of sampling per year, at a total of 156 geographically independent locations arranged on an approximate 1.5-kilometer grid designed around the home range of a fishing cat. Cameras recorded photographic captures at 24-hour intervals, generating detection and nondetection histories for each species at each site in each year. Every photograph of a person or dog was also tallied, providing a direct measure of human activity on the landscape while remaining sensitive to the privacy of people captured in the images.

The analytical heart of the study was a multi-species site-occupancy model, a Bayesian framework that jointly estimates two hidden quantities: whether a species truly occupies a site, and the probability of detecting it if it does. This distinction matters enormously for rare species. A Sunda pangolin photographed at only two sites across seven years almost certainly occurs more widely than the raw records suggest, and the hierarchical model allows information from the whole community to correct for imperfect detection. The team compared candidate model structures using leave-one-out cross-validation, standardized all continuous covariates, log-transformed distances, and guarded against spurious associations by excluding redundant predictor pathways. The final model ran three Markov chain Monte Carlo chains for one million iterations, producing 285,000 posterior samples per parameter, with convergence confirmed by standard diagnostics. All data and code were released in a public Zenodo repository.

The resulting estimates painted a detailed portrait of the community. Long-tailed macaques, detected at 101 of the 156 camera locations, showed the highest occupancy at roughly 0.61, followed by intermediate values for the fishing cat, common palm civet, smooth-coated otter and leopard cat. Large-spotted civets, hairy-nosed otters and Sunda pangolins had low occupancy, with the pangolin’s estimate the lowest and most uncertain of all. Detection probabilities varied even more dramatically: smooth-coated otters were by far the most detectable species, while the fishing cat and Sunda pangolin had detection probabilities so low—and so uncertain—that only long-term monitoring could hope to track their populations reliably.

Habitat associations emerged as a central finding. All eight species showed increasing occupancy probability with greater tree cover, a community-level effect indicating that structurally complex forest benefits multiple species simultaneously. Beyond that shared pattern, each species told its own story. The two otter species were more likely to occupy sites closer to water, but they used the landscape differently: smooth-coated otters occupied both fringe and mixed mangroves, while the hairy-nosed otter showed a stronger association with riverine mixed mangrove habitat. Fishing cats and long-tailed macaques favored back-mangrove areas without necessarily hugging watercourses. Large-spotted civets showed their strongest association with Melaleuca swamp forest, reinforcing evidence from elsewhere in Cambodia that the species depends on large blocks of undisturbed natural habitat.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive result concerned distance to villages. Fishing cats, smooth-coated otters and long-tailed macaques were all more likely to occupy sites near human settlements, a pattern the authors interpret as spatial tolerance rather than attraction, noting that the effects were modest and carried wide credible intervals. These species are known from other studies to persist, and even thrive, in human-modified landscapes. By contrast, the hairy-nosed otter, large-spotted civet and Sunda pangolin were more likely to occur farther from villages, consistent with their rarity and apparent sensitivity to human presence. For these three species, the results point directly to where conservation surveys and protections should be focused.

The temporal trends are where the study delivers its most urgent message. Over the seven survey years, occupancy declined for the Endangered long-tailed macaque and large-spotted civet, and for the Vulnerable fishing cat and smooth-coated otter. The leopard cat, hairy-nosed otter and Sunda pangolin remained statistically stable, while the common palm civet—an adaptable generalist—increased. The authors suggest the civet’s rise alongside the fishing cat’s fall may reflect mesopredator release, a well-documented ecological phenomenon in which smaller carnivores expand when larger predators that kill or intimidate them decline. The study period also overlapped the COVID-19 pandemic, when deforestation and poaching increased across Cambodia and other tropical countries as urban migrants returned to rural areas, and indiscriminate snaring remains an acute threat to wildlife nationwide.

The authors are careful about what occupancy can and cannot show. These estimates describe patterns of site use, not demographic viability, and the analysis cannot attribute declines to specific causes. They also caution that coexistence with people in space does not guarantee safety: during the study, an otter cub and a fishing cat were killed in confrontations with dogs, which roam from villages into the mangroves and may accompany poachers, and dogs can transmit diseases to otters and other carnivores.

Conservation implications flow directly from the findings. Because threatened species rely on the full spectrum of mangrove-associated habitats, protecting Melaleuca swamp forests and riverine mixed mangroves is as important as safeguarding the mangroves themselves. The researchers call for effective habitat protection and restoration, stronger anti-poaching enforcement, responsible dog ownership policies that limit dogs’ access to mangroves, and greater financial and technical support for Cambodia’s protected areas. They highlight community-based approaches—engaging local organizations in patrolling, promoting sustainable livelihoods, community ecotourism, and innovative financing such as a Conservation Basic Income funded through carbon credits or payments for ecosystem services—as pathways to durable conservation. Mechanisms such as REDD+ or Blue Carbon initiatives, they argue, could provide a sustainable finance framework linking habitat protection with local wellbeing.

Above all, the study demonstrates the irreplaceable value of long-term monitoring for species that are simply too rare and too elusive to study any other way. Baselines like these—quantitative, peer-reviewed, and grounded in seven years of field data—provide the yardstick against which future conservation interventions in one of Southeast Asia’s most important mangrove landscapes can finally be measured. Follow-up monitoring conducted annually, the authors say, will reveal whether the declines they documented can be reversed, or whether these mangrove refuges will continue to quietly lose their most vulnerable residents.

Subject of Research: Occupancy and population trends of threatened mammal communities in Southeast Asian mangrove forests

Article Title: Occupancy Baselines and Temporal Trends of Threatened Mammal Communities in Southeast Asian Mangroves

Article References: Herranz Muñoz, V., Sophatt, R., Roth, V., Tantipisanuh, N., Gale, G. A., & Jiménez, J. (2026). Occupancy Baselines and Temporal Trends of Threatened Mammal Communities in Southeast Asian Mangroves. Ecology and Evolution, 16(9), Article e74391. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.74391

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/ece3.74391

Keywords: mangroves, Cambodia, camera-trap, occupancy modeling, Sunda pangolin, fishing cat, hairy-nosed otter, large-spotted civet, multi-species model, tree cover, poaching, conservation

The research, led by Firew Bekele Abebe of Addis Ababa University and Haramaya University together with colleagues at Stockholm University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, focused on the Gomma and Gera districts in the Jimma zone, a landscape of forest fragments, crop fields, grazing lands and coffee farms. Traditionally, Arabica coffee in its native range has been cultivated only between roughly 1,200 and 2,000 meters above sea level, a narrow band dictated by the plant’s acute sensitivity to temperature. Above that line, the highlands were considered unsuitable. Yet when the researchers surveyed sites between 2,007 and 2,358 meters, they found thriving young coffee agroforests established by smallholder farmers who had made a calculated bet on a warming world.

To understand why farmers were moving uphill, the team conducted semi-structured interviews with thirty farmers who had recently established coffee agroforestry in this novel elevational range, paired with thirty neighboring farmers who had not yet made the switch. The results were striking in their consistency. Every single interviewed farmer cited climate change as a major reason for establishing coffee at these previously inhospitable heights, and 93 percent specifically pointed to rising temperatures. Two farmers added that rainfall, once too abundant for coffee, had declined enough to make cultivation viable. Crucially, this was not a story of government mandates or external pressure; it was farmers responding accurately to meteorologically real changes they had observed on their own land.

Climate was not the only driver. Just over half of the farmers said they wanted a higher and more stable income, since coffee is a perennial cash crop whose global prices are currently high. Nearly a third reported another, more surprising motivation: crop raiding. Baboons, monkeys and wild pigs were devastating their maize, teff and sorghum fields, and converting annual cropland into shaded coffee agroforests offered both a new revenue stream and a partial escape from wildlife losses. The idea itself spread through social networks, with 40 percent of farmers crediting neighbors as the source of the idea and nearly half naming neighbors as their primary source of knowledge about how to grow coffee, a pattern that hints at powerful social contagion in land-use change.

The consequences of this upward shift for biodiversity were a central question of the study, because agroforestry can cut two very different ways for conservation. When coffee is established inside existing forests, management typically thins the canopy and reduces the structural complexity that forest-associated species depend on. When it is established on open land, however, it functions as a form of ecological restoration, adding tree cover, shade, carbon storage, soil fertility and erosion control to landscapes that previously had none. The fate of the novel coffee zone therefore hinged on a deceptively simple question: were the new agroforests carved out of remaining forest, or planted on open land?

The answer was overwhelmingly the latter. Seventy-three percent of the surveyed farmers had established their coffee agroforests on open land such as former cropland or grazing areas, a pattern the researchers attribute to the scarcity of forest in the novel range and to state ownership of most remaining forest, which limits farmers’ ability to convert it. Even more encouraging were the vegetation surveys. In 30-by-30-meter plots at each site, the team counted, identified and measured every tree and shrub with a trunk diameter of at least five centimeters, along with saplings. Forest-derived and open-land-derived agroforests showed statistically indistinguishable species richness, Shannon diversity and abundance for both adult woody plants and saplings, a finding that contradicts the common assumption that agroforests established on open land are biodiversity-poor imitations of the real thing.

There were differences, to be sure. Trees in forest-derived agroforests were thicker at breast height, reflecting the presence of old, mature individuals, and community composition differed subtly between the two types, with species such as Croton macrostachyus, Ficus sur and Millettia ferruginea more abundant in forest-derived plots and Vernonia amygdalina more common in open-land plots. But the most notable feature was the extensive overlap in composition. Unlike open-land agroforests elsewhere in the tropics, which are often dominated by a handful of non-native shade trees, the Ethiopian agroforests in the novel range were built from a diverse set of native species, either planted from seeds and saplings gathered in nearby forest or regenerated naturally from seed banks and adjacent woodland. Management choices, whether trees were planted, allowed to regenerate naturally, or both, left little imprint on the resulting communities, suggesting that native tree recruitment in this landscape is remarkably resilient.

The forward-looking part of the study may prove the most consequential. When the researchers asked the thirty neighboring farmers without coffee whether they planned to establish it, 87 percent said yes, and all but one of those planned to plant on open land rather than in forest. Every one of these prospective adopters expected a better income, and half anticipated no challenges at all beyond the well-known burden of high initial investment costs, which was also the only disadvantage cited by established farmers. The researchers identify two positive feedback mechanisms that should accelerate adoption. First, farmers imitate successful neighbors, so each new agroforest becomes a visible advertisement for the next. Second, a crop-raiding spiral may take hold: as more of the landscape converts to woody agroforestry, wild animals gain more shelter and raiding pressure on remaining annual crop fields intensifies, pushing still more farmers toward coffee.

The implications ripple outward from the Jimma highlands. Modeling studies have warned that 39 to 59 percent of the land currently suitable for Arabica coffee in Ethiopia could become unsuitable by the end of the century, threatening the livelihoods of millions of smallholders and the genetic reservoir of the crop itself. An upward migration of coffee farming has long been proposed as an adaptation pathway, and this study provides the first detailed empirical evidence that the migration is already underway, driven not by top-down policy but by farmers’ own accurate perceptions of a changing climate. Because the new agroforests are overwhelmingly established on open land and are rich in native woody species, the shift is expected to increase tree cover, biodiversity and ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, shade, soil water regulation and erosion control, at higher elevations of the Afromontane landscape, an area that has historically suffered some of the region’s highest deforestation rates precisely because coffee agroforestry was absent there.

The authors are careful to note the caveats. The full landscape-scale consequences for forestation will require quantifying natural forest cover, mapping tenure rights and assessing how regulations are observed in practice, and complementary studies at the lower edge of the coffee range are needed to understand the complete regional picture. Hidden social costs, including increased household labor burdens and effects on children’s schooling documented in earlier work, also deserve attention. Yet the core finding stands as a rare piece of good news at the intersection of climate change, agriculture and conservation: in the birthplace of Arabica coffee, a warming world is nudging an entire farming system upslope, and the farms it leaves behind on the open hillsides are filling with native trees. What looks like retreat may, in this corner of Ethiopia, be a quiet expansion of the forest itself.

Subject of Research: Climate-driven upward shift of Arabica coffee agroforestry and its reforestation consequences in southwestern Ethiopia

Article Title: Climate-mediated upward shift of coffee agroforestry and associated reforestation in Arabica coffee’s native range

Article References: Abebe, F. B., Hylander, K., Nemomissa, S., Bekele, T., Zewdie, B., & Tack, A. J. M. (2026). Climate-mediated upward shift of coffee agroforestry and associated reforestation in Arabica coffee’s native range. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02470-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02470-3

Keywords: climate change, coffee agroforestry, Arabica coffee, Ethiopia, Afromontane forests, reforestation, biodiversity, ecosystem services, smallholder farmers, elevational shift, crop raiding, tree cover