Assessing mammal community composition in the Huinay Biological Reserve (Chile) through questionnaire surveys: biases associated with respondents

Abstract

The study of people’s knowledge through interviews and questionnaires can provide a good picture of the composition of mammal communities. However, there is considerable potential for error and bias in these surveys, including some associated with the familiarity of respondents with wildlife. Our main goals were: 1) to assess mammal community composition of the Huinay Biological Reserve, a remote Valdivian rainforest area in southern Chile, and 2) to evaluate the relationship between the degree of respondents’ contact with native mammals and their knowledge about the mammal community. A questionnaire was designed to gather data about the mammal species recorded by people who lived in, or had visited, the area between 2010 and 2013. A total of 13 mammal species were mentioned by 43 participants in the survey. Overall, all the mammal species that inhabit the study area according to general mammal distribution maps were identified in our survey. Both the total number of species mentioned (observed or not) and the number of species seen by the respondents were positively associated with the time they stayed in the area. Our findings suggest that questionnaire surveys may provide useful information about the composition of mammal communities in remote areas of southern Chile, but selecting knowledgeable respondents is challenging.