Summary Report
APBON 9th Web Seminar

1. Date: 9th September, 2021
Time: 15:00-17:00 in Japanese Standard Time
(13:00-15:00 in Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam), (11:45-13:45 in Nepal)(14:00-16:00 in Malaysia, Philippines, China)
2. Location, Participants
・Webex Meeting Room・19 participants (15 participants and 4 from secretariat) from 7 Nationalities
・MC: Dr. Muraoka (Gifu University)
3. Program:Opening and Announcement:
Secretariat of APBON (Ms. Neagari: Biodiversity Center of Japan)
・Greetings from Ms. Neagari from APBON Secretariat
・Welcomed all of the participants to join this 9th APBON web seminar
・The agenda and rules of the meeting were proposed
・Introduced today’s MC
Presentation1:
Dr. Alice Hughes (Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of
Sciences)"The importance of OneHealth to people and biodiversity"
Summary of presentation
In this session, Dr. Alice gave a presentation about the importance of OneHealth topeople and biodiversity. The presentation started with the definition of OneHealth, andshe explained why it’s important. She said it's important to remember that the majorityof zoonotic outbreaks in the past have zoonotic origins. That includes pandemics such as
SARS-COV2 that are still ongoing, there are far beyond just COVID but include things
like HIV aids which started off for SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus). So sheemphasized that we need to understand what driving spillover and how we can reducethat risk in future. The route of spillover was also introduced here and pointed out thatthe interactions between those three (animal wildlife, human livestock and viruses)that is what OneHealth. She also talked about the bat and badgers and TB, bats andHendra as examples. She emphasized that taking to OneHealth approach is absolutely
essential, if we want to minimize the risk of disease spreads into future. So
understanding links between species, and species and environment are essential.
Dr. Alice also explained about the bats and CoVs, which says Bat CoVs are not rare, but
spillover to human is rare. So understanding risks of when and why spillovers may
occur is very important.
In the end, Dr. Alice expressed that the interface between livestock and wildlife is also
considerable providing risks of spillover via direct contact, parasites or fluids. And she
also said that we need better information on how bats respond to stressors and how we
can protect them to maintain a safer future.
Q&A Session
Q: I was curious to find out where these were bats samples and what kind of bats they
were? Is it a wide sampling or just one kind of bat?
A: So the bats when I talked about the COVID, they’re samples from my institute, we
sampled the wildlife species I can send you the paper if you’d like to see it. Porcine
diarrhoea virus and they are species that move in to areas used by pigs. So they may be
involved with spreading porcine diarrhoea virus to pigs. But only the rhinolophids hadcoronaviruses and there were a lot or within the same population. From some work thathas not yet published at this point, we've also found other coronaviruses in Yunnan
province. So it is very common in this region it's obviously very widespread. Somethingelse that I didn't mention the rhinolophids are one of the tricky groups of bats. Someother work we've been doing has been trying to classify cryptic species because up toaround 70% of species are not currently described. There's a lot of cryptic species out
there so we need better data on species identification and when people are doing things
like viral studies they really need to also do it barcode on the bat to make sure that they
are identifying the correct species. At the moment, even if you look at the early samplesof Sars-CoV2-Like viruses in bats, the initial species Rhinolophus malayanus was
initially identified as the wrong species. They only identified it correctly when they wereforced to use the DNA barcode. So we need better data on the wildlife and domestic
animals to see what interactions look like.
Q: I think many people are interested in connection between habitat destruction on bats,and also special structure what distribution of livestock and bats. Scientists are notsure how those three factors contribute to spillover, so we need more a comprehensive
assessment of negative importance of three factors, and distance special structure of
livestock and bat habitat and human use of bats for food. So do you have any particularidea to assess relative contribution to these three factors?
A: It’s a really good question. The case of corona-virus that hasn't yet been done but it
has been looked at in case Hendra and Nipah where there were very direct interactions.
Studies so far that have said they have done it but have not done it. They basicallyoverlaid unrelated GIS layers and generally displayed poor understanding of things likebat specific ecophysiology. So the paper came out a few months ago now, but they were
bat-livestock interactions very simplistically because they had very low resolution data.
Echolocation calls, their wing structure is adapted for specific environments and habitat
densities, they do not move outside those landscapes.
So the types of analysis that have generally been done have not used appropriate data.
Some analysis we've started to try to do with is also have been looking like species
demography. We know the across the year risks are going vary, these species are shift
between caves during different parts of the year. Females typically will use maternity
roost where they were born. During that part of the year they will set actually segregate
and only those individuals will use it. So they’re using different parts of the landscapeat different times. In terms of the eco-physiological stress obviously periods by there isscant food, for example during the wet season where their foraging period limited isgoing to be more stressful in the winter.
Something that we are just starting to try to unpick is how does landscape management
and these seasonal stress events interact to increase things like the viral load with theviral incidents in different species. As yet quantitative assessments have not been done
but they are urgently needed. Something interesting like observed from 14 years or sowhen I working in Asia, almost every rural area if you go to caves you will find evidence.
It's very common than even last year during the pandemic my students were finding
hunting occurring at some cave sites. What we are probably seeing now though is it's
becoming something that is much more recreational which means that we don't know
how long people will continue these activities for.
So if you've grown up eating bats in your village and then you go to a big city for acouple of years to study and then you come home and you eat bats with your family, areyou still immune? Have you still retained that immunity? Because it happened and that
immunity is decrease when you go back to university the next term you may actually
get the disease. So understanding all these types of factor is really important and wedon't have a good idea yet. That's also very interesting it's in the case of corona viruses,
if you look at publications from 2018, 2019 there were probably papers for showing
these types of corona viruses are in bats. It was not seen as a big issue until the
pandemic happened. And even after study was initiated the year before the pandemic
because it was something that we thought would be interesting to look at before weobserve the risk. So we need better collaborations between immunologists between
virologists between conservation scientists so we can better understand how thesefactors link, and actually have integral to OneHealth approaches to maintain species
health. Because at the moment it’s happening in parallel and if you look at almost every
virological researcher, those people don't know how to handle the bats. So theirassessments of how we manage ecosystem is really bad.
Q: You are in a very wonderful position to assess those factors, so I’m very much looking
for we could find in future. And I'm thinking that some simple models are spillover
process would be helpful, do you have any model?
A: So we have not made one yet, but the analysis I showed from Africa which was doneby another group when they were looking for Ebola, is something we've been thinking
about applying we just want to make sure we have date of the correct resolution because
as long as the problem is that when a model is done badly the people who areinterpreting it wouldn't have faith on that. So we need to make sure that it is accurateenough that any types of error would not have negative implications. So it's somethingthat we are starting to work on now we are collecting the data for but we don't have as
yet. One of the major issues is that, for example my institute have about 42 bat species
and before we increase cryptic species that we are trying to describe now. All of thosespecies have different risks and different profiles, so trying to integrate that type of data
it's challenging to do well but it's a work in progress. I can send a link of ebola paper
though because they did some interesting stuff but will looking at how we could dosomething creative.
Q: How we can deliver your findings or insights to the concept? I mean corporative ideawith AOGEO or of course you reserve this in APBON of course, because I saw many
geospatial information from your analysis and data and I also read your email thattouching something that we need kind of corporate corporation with AOGEO to fillingthe data gaps. So maybe this could be one of the topics that we will discuss in the next
month APBON workshop but any idea and quick response will be welcomed.
A: I think that would be a great idea. I do a lot of spatial analysis myself, because Ithink using spatial approaches is a fantastic way to give research context to understandthe interactions between species and environment. And I think something APBON isgreat site to understanding the ecosystem from the ecosystem point. I think by working
more with AOGEO we can interpolate that so we could try to get things that get moregeneralizable or connect data in a way that we can understand the systemic processes ofunderline the patterns we see. And I think that that would be a real potential and manyof the people had incredible on-site data. How do we make the most of that data so weunderstand the implications is more important.
Presentaton2:
Dr. Angela Quiros (Akkeshi Marine Station, Field Science Center for Northern
Biosphere, Hokkaido University)"Blue Carbon Ecosystem Services and the social vulnerability of fishing communities."
Summary of presentation
Dr. Angela said she was honored to be invited by the APBON seminar series to give thispresentation on her research, which is the part of collaborative program between Japanand Philippines and Indonesia called Blue CARES.
In this session, she talked about Blue Carbon and Ecosystem Services within thecontext of small-scale fisheries in mangroves and seagrasses Busuanga Island,
Philippines. She shared a social ecological approach to assess blue carbon ecosystems,
and used mixed methodology to assess the quality of blue carbon ecosystems and thesocial economic context of the communities that rely on them. Using these multiple
sources, she explained that we can inform quality policy decisions at the local scale
which are scalable to the national level and beyond
Her presentation started with the introduction to blue carbon and ecosystem services,then the Philippines context, and the Vulnerability framework, the methods and results,
and the take home messages.
Through the above explanations, the conclusions of her presentation are summarizedas:-Vulnerability criteria can help address multiple SDGs at once, while tackling natural
resource management issues.
-4 policy prescriptions for Busuanga Island(For more details, please refer to the presentation materials.)

Q&A Session
Q: I understand it from your presentation that the tourism and also the exposure tosocial changes are kind of risks to the blue carbon ecosystems, also I ‘m thinking thathow do you reset climate change for example rising sea water temperature could affectblue carbon ecosystems or to some ecosystem services to the local communities. Do you
have any idea about it?
A: That’s a really good question because most of the vulnerability studies that I haveseen have looked at variability of habitat of communities to climate change impacts andthese impacts were mostly physical impacts, like sea surface temperature, increased
storms, higher tides etc. And the difference with this study is that it doesn't consider
exposure at that scale. Other studies have found that exposure to adjacent barangays
within the same municipality are the same, so for our study, exposure variables suchsea surface temperature or increased storms would have the same level among thebarangays studied. But my exposure variables were the impacts of human actions suchas tourism and urbanism. So, I really want to look at impacts of peoples’ behavior andhuman development, rather than these physical aspects.
But to answer your question, Busuanga Island is pretty small and within the context ofthe sea surface temperature, all of the Busuanga barangays will experience that same
exposure to a climate change impact such as this because it’s such a fine-scale study.
However, if we were to do a similar study all over the Philippines or regionally in South
East Asia the answer is yes, the different sites would have different exposure values forsea surface temperature etc. But at least for our site it's too fine scaled a study, so they
all have the same exposure level anyway.
Q: If you aim to inform decision makers or some governments for the conservation of
ecosystems, your ideas are based on exposure to these human activities and then yourfindings coupled or integrated with the impacts of such physical stressors so that you
could have integrated knowledge which will be quite useful for decision makers forconservation of blue carbon ecosystems from much more aspects.
A: I agree that incorporating these fine-scale data to larger scale data would be
informative but one thing I wanted to add which is I believe one of the key findings ofthis paper is that even within one island, there are significant differences in both theuse and the quality and quantity of these ecosystems, and so we can't really generalize
but what I think this can show is that because there's so many other coastal
communities all over South East Asia , we cannot generalize them to say “this is how
they will act”, so I think that will at least help the decision makers just to be aware ofthe fact that ecosystem service delivery is partial, and it is patchy.
Q: I appreciate your comments. Because whenever I joined the meetings of the GEO,
they always discussing the importance of in situ data and local knowledge. But they are
all thinking about some physical aspects of the earth system or ecosystems. So our ideas
or insights based on the local community ecosystems would give more kind of
meaningful knowledge for the decision making processes.
A: Yes, it’s very patchy. This type of data is difficult to get, you actually have to talk toevery single person, go to their house. Furthermore, the landings of small-scale fisheries
are largely invisible fisheries. But as I showed at the start of the talk, they make up
equal amount to the commercial fisheries. It's very hard to find records of them. So you
have to go out yourself and make friends with the locals, get catch diaries to get thisdata over periods of time.
Q: What do the fulltime fishers do? Is there alternative livelihood beside fisher?
Another question is, is the Barangay community fishery healthy? And does the climatechange have an impact on the protected area?
A: Thank you so much, your questions were great. I’ll just address them one by one.
When I did the household interviews, I asked the head of the household percentage
contribution to your household income. I didn’t ask for a value and I didn’t ask for anumber of hours, so this is just in the local persons head, OK, so fishing makes half myincome but actually I have a small farm and I raise pigs and chickens, and my wife has
a little store, so fishing would be 50, farming would be 30~40 and 10% would be like alittle commercial something on the side and so that's how we calculated livelihood. In
these coastal communities actually these alternative livelihoods are farming, they are
involved in transportation, maybe they have a store or they have a fish processing
sideline. Another thing and especially in Coron municipality, it was tourism that hasthat contributed to the household. So I believe that these diverse livelihood approaches
really help the locals, so the barangays did not have absolute high sensitivity for social
economic variables.
Maybe was a portion of respondents which were full time fishers and we divided theminto fisher versus gleaner, fishing in boat, gleaning, which means walking aroundpicking up your food during low tide. Barangay is the coastal community, it's not thefisheries territory, just a village. And protected areas in Busuanga Island are mostly
focused on coral reef area, as they do in other places. But now the local government isstarting to have some protected areas, this cover seagrass and mangroves, though it's
not fully developed yet; they're working on it.
In terms of variables related to climate change as part of this vulnerability assessment,
I did not include any because I thought that all the Barangays in the villages received
that same exposure. And I didn't include any variables to show how the fish catch was
decreasing or about illegal activities, and I think those are really good variables to add
for sensitivity. Thank you for that idea for other vulnerability assessments I think thoseparts are quite important, but from my in-depth interviews people have said that theircatches were decreasing.
Q: I was wondering what are the key recommendations; very simple questions forconservation intervention in the area, because it this is very detailed and crowded work.
So I was wondering if there has been any interventions or recommendations for the areaand how this will be integrated into the decision making at the local and also at thenation skill?
A: Thank you so much that's a very good question. One of our key partners, they arealso co-authors of this paper is the NGO C-3 Philippines. And one conservationintervention they've done already is mangrove rehabilitation and caretaking, andtraining of the locals; they do that in a few of these Barangays.
The next step for this type of work is when I'm allowed to go back to the field, is toworkshop with the local decision makers, and each of these Barangays showing them
their vulnerability score. Because Filipinos like friendly competitions, sharing thesescores will make it more interactive or fun, and we can have positive suggestions. And I
think giving this information to the local mayors and also the governor at the moreregional level is important. A solid suggestion is to invest more in the education,
because some of these Barangays have no high schools, and we can improve that byadding high schools or improving their roads in between barangays, so they have accessto neighboring high schools. Simple things like that, I know the NGOs are leading theway for a lot of these conservation efforts, but to also encourage other groups to be more
active in the area and I think that will have improvements both on the local and thenational scale.
Adding on that, some of the data collection was done by local policymakers and forexample C-3 mangrove caretakers. We use their catch diaries or they recorded thecatches of other fishers from the landing point where they went. So I think that with

some of this type of research where you really get involved with the community andthen share the results with the community afterwards, when we have a chance,
hopefully we can improve the situation.
General discussion and Information exchange-The information and details of 13th APBON Workshop (19 October) were shared.
-The information and details of 14th AOGEO Symposium (10-12 November) were shared.
It requires inputs from all task groups of AOGEO including APBON, so the draft
concept of inputs will be share by Dr. Muraoka later.
-Side event will be held on 25th November 2021 during the “GEO Week 2021”. 3min foreach task group will be needed in this side event.

-The outline of the 13th APBON Workshop was discussed as below.

-It was introduced that there are 2 parts to contribute from APBON here, and one of thespecial sections is focusing on the biodiversity for understanding climate change anddisaster risk reduction. And the draft was shared as well. The second one is thediscussion of task activities section which will held on day 2 of 14th AOGEO symposium.