Background/Question/Methods Palm oil is the most productive vegetable oil per area and its demand will continue to increase for use in the food, cosmetic, cleaning, and biofuel industries. Colombia, one of the world’s most biodiverse countries, is the third largest producer of palm oil globally and the first in Latin America. The environmental impacts of oil palm cultivation have been devastating and well-documented in Southeast Asia, where 80% of the palm oil is produced globally at the expense of valuable habitat such as tropical forests and peat swamps. The context in which palm oil is produced in Colombia, and its associated impacts on biodiversity, is very different and deserves a closer look. We investigated current and projected impacts of oil palm on threatened vertebrates (birds, mammals, and amphibians). We highlight a few areas where expansion would be detrimental to threatened fauna and should be avoided, and many where expansion is possible without affecting these vulnerable species. To complement this spatial analysis which was done at the national level, we collected field data for birds in forest fragments immersed in an oil palm matrix in the Eastern plains of Colombia to identify landscape elements and characteristics that are beneficial or detrimental to regional avifauna. Results/Conclusions At the national level, we found minimal overlap between suitable areas for oil palm production and threatened vertebrate distributions. Our analysis demonstrates that there is room for oil palm to expand in Colombia without incurring severe conservation risks for threatened vertebrates, so long as it avoids a few high-priority areas such as la Serranía de la Macarena, the Andes-Amazon transition, the Darién, and the Tumaco forests. Field data from bird censuses in forests immersed in oil palm matrices point towards important landscape level elements that should be kept or restored. Long, wide corridors close to other forest patches are fundamental, as well as connectedness to other forest fragments in order to keep a substantial species richness and functional diversity in these landscapes. Forest fragments and corridors immersed in oil palm fare better than those immersed in pastures, but only if they remain connected to other forested habitats. We suggest a framework to design oil palm landscapes in ways that are beneficial to the bird diversity of the landscape, while keeping oil palm productivity.
