Clouds on the horizon: identifying global priorities for conservation marketing and planning the conservation of the Sunda clouded leopard on Borneo

Conservation effort and action is limited by resources. In response previous authors have sought to identify priorities for conservation and it has become clear that making decisions about conservation priorities necessitates encompassing the fields of human behaviour and psychology, politics, economics and fundamental ecology. In this thesis I bring together two novel strands of research in this arena, 'conservation marketing' and the identification of priority locations for conservation. In the first part of this thesis I present an analysis of how a representative subset of mammalian species might be prioritised in the context of conservation marketing. I develop a novel collaboration with a market research firm to assess quantitatively which species a large sample of English-speaking people value for conservation, and analyse their choices to reveal the attributes that drive these preferences. Developing this idea, I extend this analysis to all terrestrial mammals to identify potential Ambassadors for conservation marketing campaigns. Felids perform well on metrics of charisma, and for many species of big cat their large biogeographical ranges encompassing many other threatened mammalian species make them good potential Ambassadors. Despite its relative unfamiliarity to the public, the Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi) is among the species identified as a potentially good ambassador for conservation marketing and it is also one that faces severe threats from land use change across its range. The second part of this thesis therefore provides insight into the threats faced by clouded leopards, how these threats impact them, and how they might be mitigated. I develop the first map of predicted deforestation across Borneo and use this to map the historic and future impacts of land-use change on clouded leopard populations (their demography and genetics), taking account of their favoured habitats and its fragmentation. Finally, I compare a number of contrasting policy scenarios to highlight how the existing network of protected areas provides poor coverage for clouded leopards and how new protected areas might improve this. These techniques demonstrate a toolset that can be usefully applied to a wide range of species and habitats in the future.