A global review of the threats of mining on mid-sized and large mammals

Abstract

Mineral exploitation threatens wildlife by the contamination of soil and water sources, vegetation suppression, and due to changes in landscape configuration. The large and mid-sized forest-dependent mammals need large areas to support their ecological needs, and are frequently impacted by these landscape alterations. Hitherto, there have not been comprehensive reviews of scientific papers reporting on the impacts of the legal mineral exploitation on these animals worldwide. We used the Web of Science and Scopus to select peer-reviewed research articles reporting on those impacts on the large and mid-sized mammals with terrestrial and arboreal habits. Thus, we i) classified the scientific articles according to their methodological approach, ii) examined the main methods of data collection, iii) identified the main impacts recorded, iv) associated the number of studies published by country to the measures of social welfare and economic growth of countries, and v) evaluated the density of mineral resources within the species extent of occurrence, as a proxy to the threat level of mining activities on these species. We found only 39 peer-reviewed articles describing the impacts of mining activities on these animals. These researches mostly quantify the population reduction associated to mining activities, based on line-transect surveys of wildlife. Forest suppression around mining zones is the most frequent threat assessed, and is reported as the main impact on these mammals. We found 153 mammal species to be affected by mining activities, but mining is not mentioned as a threat in the IUCN Red list for 84% (128 spp) of these. Thus, we suggest the inclusion of mining threats in the IUCN assessments of these species, and we urge researchers to intensify the studies of the direct and indirect impacts of mining on large and mid-sized mammals across all ecosystems.