Abstract
SummaryPassive acoustic monitoring is rapidly gaining recognition as a practical, affordable and robust tool for measuring gun hunting levels within protected areas, and consequently for its potential to evaluate anti-poaching patrols’ effectiveness based on outcome (i.e., change in hunting pressure) rather than effort (e.g., kilometres patrolled) or output (e.g., arrests). However, there has been no report to date of a protected area successfully using an acoustic grid to explore baseline levels of gun hunting activity, adapting its patrols in response to the evidence extracted from the acoustic data and then evaluating the effectiveness of the new patrol strategy. We report here such a case in Cameroon’s Korup National Park, where anti-poaching patrol effort was markedly increased in the 2015–2016 Christmas/New Year holiday season to curb the annual peak in gunshots recorded by a 12-sensor acoustic grid in the same period during the previous 2 years. Despite a three- to five-fold increase in patrol days, distance and area covered, the desired outcome – lower gun hunting activity – was not achieved under the new patrol scheme. The findings emphasize the need for adaptive wildlife law enforcement and how passive acoustic monitoring can help attain this goal, and they warn about the risks of using effort-based metrics of anti-poaching strategies as a surrogate for desired outcomes. We propose ways of increasing protected areas’ capacity to adopt acoustic grids as a law enforcement monitoring tool.
Highlights
Field patrols constitute the primary wildlife law enforcement tool in many protected areas
There has been no report to date of a protected area successfully using an acoustic grid to explore baseline levels of gun hunting activity, adapting its patrols in response to the evidence extracted from the acoustic data and evaluating the effectiveness of the new patrol strategy
We report here such a case in Cameroon’s Korup National Park, where anti-poaching patrol effort was markedly increased in the 2015–2016 Christmas/New Year holiday season to curb the annual peak in gunshots recorded by a 12-sensor acoustic grid in the same period during the previous 2 years
Summary
Field patrols constitute the primary wildlife law enforcement tool in many protected areas. Monitoring their effectiveness is important for adaptive wildlife management (Jachmann 2008, Linkie et al 2015) – an iterative process that explicitly incorporates feedback from past actions to improve the effectiveness of future management decisions (Williams & Brown 2014). While GPS-enabled devices have drastically improved the ability to measure metrics of effort (e.g., kilometres patrolled) by logging routes in high spatiotemporal resolution, output monitoring is often limited to metrics that are prone to biases in both collection and interpretation (e.g., encounter rates with spent cartridges), whereas wildlife abundance – a common outcome metric – is slow to respond to improved protection (Keane et al 2011, Wiafe & Amoah 2012). There has been no report to date of a park authority using an acoustic grid to explore gun hunting patterns, adapting its patrols in response to those patterns and evaluating the new strategy based on its effects on poaching levels
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