Abstract
AbstractProtected areas are fundamental for conservation, yet are constantly threatened by illegal activities, such as cattle encroachment and wildlife poaching, which reduce biodiversity. Law enforcement is an essential component of reducing illegal activities. Although necessary, law enforcement is costly and its effectiveness in the field is rarely monitored. Improving ranger patrol efficiency is likely to decrease illegal activity occurrence and benefit biodiversity conservation, without additional resource implications. Using ranger‐collected data, we develop a method to improve ranger patrol allocation, targeting different combinations of conservation priorities, and predict that detections of illegal activities can be greatly improved. In a field test in Queen Elizabeth Protected Area, Uganda, we increased detections of illegal activities in some cases by over 250% without a change in ranger resources. This easily implemented method can be used in any protected area where data on the distribution of illegal activities are collected, and improve law‐enforcement efficiency in resource‐limited settings.
Highlights
Illegal activities such as poaching are increasing and a major threat to biodiversity (Hilborn et al 2006; Biggs et al 2013)
Theoretical work has explored security games for allocating resources to protect wildlife and fisheries (Haskell et al 2014; Yang et al 2014; Nguyen et al 2016), agent based models of poachers and rangers (Keane et al 2012) and spatial models of optimal protected area design and patrolling (Albers 2010) as frameworks for thinking about optimising law enforcement. These methods, which rely on many assumptions, may struggle to cope with the complexity of illegal activities in practice: for example, we demonstrated that different illegal activities occur in different regions of a protected area, suggesting that the optimal ranger patrol strategies will differ for each threat (Critchlow et al 2015)
We described a simple method using maps of illegal activity occurrence to improve the effectiveness of ranger patrols
Summary
Illegal activities such as poaching are increasing and a major threat to biodiversity (Hilborn et al 2006; Biggs et al 2013) While policies such as trade restrictions, education and financial penalties can help reduce illegal activities (Rosen & Smith 2010; Treves & Bruskotter 2014), protected area conservation requires law enforcement policies at all levels, including ranger patrols, intelligence gathering and effective criminal justice systems (Challender & MacMillan 2014; Tranquilli et al 2014; Rauset et al 2015). Law enforcement is crucial for reducing illegal activities (Geldmann et al 2013) it represents the single largest expenditure in many protected areas (Jachmann 2008; Plumptre et al 2014), suggesting that increasing the efficiency of ranger patrol activities should be a priority. Theoretical studies suggest that significant financial savings could be achieved through better allocation of law enforcement (Dhanjal-Adams et al 2015)
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