Andreas Wilting; Anna Cord; Andrew J. Hearn; Deike Hesse; Azlan Mohamed; Carl Traeholdt; Susan M. Cheyne; Sunarto Sunarto; Mohd-Azlan Jayasilan; Joanna Ross; Aurélie C. Shapiro; Anthony Sebastian; Stefan Dech; Christine Breitenmoser; Jim Sanderson; J. W. Duckworth; Heribert Hofer

“ Based on our findings, we recommend that future conservation efforts for the flat-headed cat should focus on the identified remaining key localities and be implemented through a continuous dialogue between local stakeholders, conservationists and scientists to ensure its long-term survival. ”

“ Furthermore, the low proportion of key forest areas under complete protection emphasises the urgency of further conservation action. We consider the flat-headed cat suitable to serve as a flagship species for the protection of several other endangered species associated with the threatened tropical lowland and peat swamp forests. ”

“ For 88 out of a total of 107 records, geographic coordinates had to be estimated from descriptions of localities. Photographs from camera-traps or direct sightings of flat-headed cats with precise location information were available for 19 locations (15 on Borneo and four on Sumatra) . During one of these sightings along a small tributary of the Kinabatangan River in Sabah (Malaysia) two authors (AW & AM) filmed a wild flat-headed cat for several minutes (Video S1) . ”

“ Our study showed that large areas of the predicted former distribution range have already been transformed into croplands or plantations, and based on the records from this study and our experiences we cast doubt on the statement that flat-headed cats live and reproduce in plantations. ”

“ For instance, Leyhausen reported that a captive flat-headed cat displayed more interest in a mouse in a pond than on land [7] , and the stomach of an adult shot at a riverbank contained only fish [1] . Individuals have been observed or collected in undisturbed primary and secondary forests mostly along rivers, streams and in flooded areas [1] , [5] , [11] . Only Khan [in 5] has reported sightings in oil palm plantations and even speculated that this species benefits from the expansion of these plantations in Peninsular Malaysia [12] . ”

“ Figure 6b illustrates the same results projected onto the SarVision data set of Borneo, the most precise vegetation classification and the only one which distinguishes between montane, upland and lowland forest. Many of the predicted potentially suitable historical habitats were assigned to the unsuitable or poor classes 0 to 2 in all three land cover maps. The relative proportion of already degraded habitat (e.g. arable land, plantations, mosaic vegetation) was similar for all omission threshold scenarios (0%, 10%, 20%, 30% and 40% thresholds) between the three land cover maps (Table 5) . ”

“ This may even be a conservative estimate of loss, since our model accepted remaining forest patches of any size as suitable habitat even though it is likely that small and fragmented forests will not support viable populations of flat-headed cats. ”

“ We took the rounded mean value of these extremes of 4 km2 as an estimate of the home-range size of the flat-headed cat. To accommodate uncertainties associated with the precise position of point localities we used a buffer area of three times the extrapolated home-range (12 km2) . This analysis was conducted using the Spatial Analyst extension of ArcGIS 9.3 for all three land cover classifications. ”

“ These abiotic variables were then analysed together with the species occurrence data using the Maximum Entropy algorithm as implemented in MaxEnt software Version 3.2.1. Ten individual MaxEnt models were run in batch mode with the following settings: Auto features (feature types are automatically selected depending on the training sample size) , perform jackknife tests, logistic output format, random test percentage = 25, regularisation multiplier = 1, maximum iterations = 1000, convergence threshold = 0.0001 and maximum number of background points = 10,000. ”

“ AJH & JR thank Yayasan Sabah, Danum Valley Management Committee and the FACE Foundation for issuing permission to conduct their research and Glen Reynolds and the Royal Society SEARRP for logistical support. SMC undertook this work in collaboration with David W. Macdonald. and their work on Bornean felids is part of the WildCRU/Panthera collaboration, and was carried out within the OuTrop-CIMTROP multi-disciplinary research project in the northern Sabangau forest, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. ”