Coupling paraecology and hunter GPS self‐follows to quantify village bushmeat hunting dynamics across the landscape scale

Abstract

Hunting for bushmeat represents a complex social–ecological system ill‐suited to top‐down management. Community participatory management is an alternative approach with increasing support for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. Key to a community approach is long‐term monitoring: this can both catalyse local ownership of and cohesion around management and is necessary to assess the effects of interventions and make changes as needed through adaptive management. Yet community‐driven methods to monitor hunting remain underdeveloped: they often fail to account for sampling bias and do not incorporate space in a thorough way, and data are not communally analysed to simulate effects of potential management decisions. We created a novel community bushmeat monitoring programme to address these gaps across 20 villages in north‐eastern Gabon. Paraecologists conducted standardised monitoring of bushmeat, and hundreds of hunters conducted GPS self‐follows mapping village hunting catchments. We integrated these data to estimate the proportion of bushmeat sampled and make robust extrapolations of total offtake across space and time, estimating an annual offtake of ~30,000 animals of >56 species across all villages. Here, we present our approach and data—and apply them through a case study of six sympatric duiker species—to inform new directions for social–ecological bushmeat research and management.

Fluid hunter motivation in Central Africa: Effects on behaviour, bushmeat and income

“…Our data did not permit pursuing that idea, but paraecology coupled with participating hunters could be used to scale up spatially and temporally explicit monitoring of trapping such as that of Coad (2007). Regardless, in our study SES trap use is decreasing over time (van Vliet & Nasi, 2008a) and only 24% of animals hunted are trapped (Froese et al, 2022), so trapping may be of less importance than gun-hunting for sustainability. Yet the dramatic reduction in gun-hunting success when trapping also occurred shows that legacy effects may be occurring-areas trapped are typically done so for long periods, so even if trap efficiency is low wildlife populations could be depleted over time.…”

“…Still, coupling our detailed drivers of hunt-level offtake with our more general results from our data sources of defaunation gradients (Beirne et al, 2019;Koerner et al, 2017) and community-level hunting dynamics (Froese et al, 2022) should provide a fertile playground (Mastandrea & Pericàs, 2021) for exploring potential patterns of defaunation and ways to understand it in our study SESs. It is striking that individual animal biomass did not increase farther from villages.…”

“…Rural hunters from nine villages (five Kota and four Fang) near the town of Makokou, provincial capital of the Ogooué-Ivindo Province, Gabon, collected data via the Nsombou Abalghe-Dzal project's participatory bushmeat hunting monitoring programme coupling paraecology with hunter GPS self-follows (Froese et al, 2022; https://nadag abon.org). The study area is characterized by low human population density and relatively intact forests and wildlife; yet it is under increasing disturbance from logging, mining and associated access (more information in Froese et al, 2022).…”

“…Hunters carried simple GPS units (Mobile Action® i-gotU GT-600) to quantify their spatial behaviour. The bushmeat hunting SESs in the study area, process of our engagement in community-driven research and methodological specifics of hunter GPS self-follows are described in detail in Froese et al (2022). 2019-0047).…”

Contemporary wild meat hunting, consumption, and trade in Africa

“…Participatory approaches to monitoring and management are explored by several articles, including a novel community-driven method to quantify village wild meat hunting and improve hunter self-regulation (Froese and Ebang Mbélé et al, 2022); incorporating participatory data into offtake surveys to improve inferences about sustainability (Riddell et al, 2022); mobilising local ecological knowledge to understand the occurrence of wildlife and impacts of consumption (Hariohay et al, 2022), and incorporating the views of various stakeholders to determine factors facilitating and motivating unauthorised hunting (Kisingo et al, 2022).…”