Assessing the impact of forest structure disturbances on the arboreal movement of orangutans - an agent-based modelling approach

Orangutans encounter habitat quality deterioration due to land-use changes and associated forest fires. This creates a complex stress scenario for the individual animals and threatens populations. The disturbance of forest canopies or loss of trees induce changes in primates' movement behavior: the preferred arboreal movement needs to be complemented by movements on the ground requiring more energy, and prolonging the search for fruiting and nesting trees. This all together leads to a change in the daily activity patterns (time spent to travel, feeding and resting) and subsequently to shift in the available energy budget decreasing the fitness of the animals. While agent-based models have been developed and widely employed to check the impact of disturbances or conservation management on the habitat use, population development and viability, there has been less emphasis on studying the direct impact of canopy disturbances on the arboreal movement of individual primates, which can be the origin of cascading effects on animals health, vitality and subsequent life processes. We developed the agent-based simulation model BORNEO (arBOReal aNimal movEment mOdel), which explicitly describes both orangutans' arboreal and terrestrial movement between trees in a forest depending on distances among trees and canopy structure. Orangutans in the model perform activities with a motivation to balance energy intake and expenditure involving mechanical work of locomotion. The model was tested with forest inventory data obtained in Sebangau National Park, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Information on tree constellations, sizes etc. were used to reconstruct a virtual forest with similar characteristics (e.g., trees network in terms of connections between overlapping canopies) as in the real world. In order to parameterise the energy related processes of the orangutans described in the model, we applied a computationally intensive evolutionary algorithm on high computing clusters and evaluated the simulation results against behavioural patterns of the orangutans observed in Sebangau. Both the simulated variability and proportion of activity budgets including feeding, resting, and travelling time for female and male orangutans respectively, confirmed the suitability of the model for its purpose. We used the calibrated model to compare the activity patterns and energy budgets of orangutans in both natural and disturbed forests. The results confirm field observations that orangutans in the disturbed forest are prone to experiencing deficit energy balance by spending more time travelling and less time feeding. The finding of a threshold of forest disturbances which affects a significant change in the activity pattern points out that forest deterioration may even threaten the survival of orangutans to some extent.

Our study (a) introduces the first agent-based model describing the arboreal movement of primates and can serve as a tool to investigate the direct impact of forest changes and disturbances on the behaviour of orangutans; and (b) demonstrates the suitability of high-performance computing to optimise the calibration of complex agent-based models describing animal behaviour at a fine spatiotemporal scale (1-meter and 1-second granularity).