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

Abstract

AbstractHunting 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.