Illegal wildlife use and protected area management in Ghana

Abstract

Starting in 2004, a system to monitor patrol staff performance, illegal wildlife use and trends in large-mammal populations was established in nine protected areas in Ghana. The main objectives were to use monitoring feedback as the foundation for informed decisions to aid adaptive and performance management, and to identify the most important factors contributing to wildlife conservation. The competitive management system resulted in a doubling of patrol performance. As a result, in the six savannah sites, poaching was reduced to acceptable levels by the end of 2007, but in the three forest sites, poaching remained high. To reverse poaching trends in the forest required a conventional patrol effort that was 10 times higher than that in the savannah. The relationship between the amount of illegal activity with the operational budget, senior staff performance, encounter rates with large mammals, human population densities and habitat, was investigated for 2005–2007. With three predictor variables, the model explained 63% of the variation in the encounter rates with illegal activity. Increasing human population densities gave higher levels of poaching. Increasing frequencies of camp visits by senior officers and increasing operational budgets gave lower levels of poaching. In the second model, elephant poaching was used as the response variable and relative elephant density as an additional predictor variable. One predictor variable – that is elephant density – explained 38% of the total variation in elephant poaching. Elephant density incorporated the effects of camp visit frequencies, human densities, and habitat. Commercial trophy hunting for ivory, as opposed to subsistence hunting, was more sensitive to the density of the target species and efforts to curtail the activity. Subsistence hunting was proportional to human densities, with mainly members of nearby communities involved, while elephant poaching was not, mainly involving specialised hunters from towns further away.