Deterring poaching in western Tanzania: The presence of wildlife researchers

Abstract

a b s t r a c tIllegal poaching threatens wildlife across Africa. Historically and even today, conservationists have lobbied local and national governments to create and better manage protected lands to reduce this threat. In many cases, however, governments are either unable or unwilling to invest further resources in exclusive protected areas, such as national parks. In addition to traditional methods, or where such approaches are not feasible, a complimentary form of protection is researcher presence, which has been described recently to deter wildlife poaching. We present data over four years that assesses the impact of researcher presence on wildlife and snare encounter rate in an unprotected area in western Tanzania, where there is a mid-term chimpanzee study ongoing. We systematically collected spatiotemporal presence data on the nine, most common mammal species in the study area, as well as all snares. Snare encounter rates increased with distance from researcher base station, whilst overall mammal encounter rates decreased. Further, mammal encounter rates have increased each year since the arrival and permanence of researchers in this remote area. Our findings have implications for the benefits of researcher presence, namely in deterring poaching, especially in unprotected areas with minimal governmental surveillance.

Conservation research presence protects: a case study of great ape abundance in theDja region,Cameroon

“…Evidence-based evaluation is required (Sutherland et al, 2004;Ferraro & Patanayak, 2006;Laurance, 2013) to support previous suggestions that researcher presence can have a positive effect on the protection of faunal communities (Köndgen et al, 2008;Tranquilli et al, 2012;Piel et al, 2015), as well as to understand the impacts of such benefits. In this study, we found differences in the abundance of chimpanzee and gorilla nests, the availability of suitable nesting habitat and the levels of human activity features in each site.…”

“…There is some evidence that researchers provide both active and passive protective effects, for example, by deterring poaching (Piel et al, 2015) or by offering financial benefits to adjacent communities who in turn will support protected areas (PAs; Laurance, 2013).…”

“…Sutherland et al, 2004;Kapos et al, 2008;Pullin & Knight, 2009). A number of studies evaluating NGOs or research projects contribute a varying degree of empirical evidence for their role in biodiversity protection (Köndgen et al, 2008;Campbell et al, 2011;Tranquilli et al, 2012;N'Goran et al, 2012;Piel et al, 2015).…”

Assessment of Chimpanzee Nest Detectability in Drone-Acquired Images

“…Several studies have documented the impact of habitat loss [2][3][4], poaching [5][6][7] and infectious disease [8,9] on wild populations. In Tanzania, 75% woodland vegetation than the closed riverine forest.…”

Passive acoustic monitoring reveals group ranging and territory use: a case study of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

“…In the Issa valley, Tanzania, ten custom built solar powered acoustic transmission units (SPATUs) were deployed (Table 1) where the Ugalla Primate Project, a long-term research project, has been consistently running since 2008 [40]. The vegetation at Issa is predominantly miombo-woodland with interspersed grasslands, swamp, and riverine closed-canopy forest.…”