Riparian buffer management, rather than surrounding forest cover and buffer width, drives pest attacks in oil palm plantations

The rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia has caused extensive deforestation and landscape fragmentation. Riparian buffers (vegetated strips along the edges of rivers) have been shown to enhance biodiversity, water quality, and erosion control. However, plantation managers have raised concerns that these buffers may harbour pests such as nettle caterpillars, bagworms, and rhinoceros beetles (Oryctes rhinoceros). These pests damage the palms and facilitate the spread Ganoderma boninense (a fungal pathogen). Using causal inference modelling we examined how riparian buffer characteristics (width and habitat quality), oil palm age, and surrounding landscape features influence pest and disease incidence in oil palms adjacent to riparian areas in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. We surveyed 47,500 palms for pest and disease damage and used mark-release-recapture techniques to track O. rhinoceros movements in oil palms adjacent to riparian buffers. Most O. rhinoceros activity (66.30%) occurred within the plantations, and only 6.10% occurred within riparian buffers, with limited movement between habitats. Oil palm age was a dominant driver of pest attacks: young palms were more susceptible to lepidopteran caterpillars and O. rhinoceros, whereas G. boninense was more prevalent in mature palms. Neither the surrounding forest cover nor the quality of the riparian buffer affected the incidence of pest attacks. Riparian buffer width increased O. rhinoceros attacks, reduced G. boninense infection, and had no effect on lepidopteran caterpillars, highlighting that surrounding forest cover and riparian buffers do not drive pest attacks in oil palm plantations. Instead, management of oil palms within the buffers s is likely to be more important in managing pests; increases in invasive oil palms within the buffers increased the incidence of caterpillar damage, and higher numbers of remnant old oil palms increased O. rhinoceros attacks in adjacent oil palms. Overall, riparian buffers were found to contribute little to pest spillover, suggesting that their biodiversity and connectivity benefits outweigh minor pest risks, especially if invasive young and remnant old oil palms within the buffers are effectively managed and native vegetation restored.