Abstract
Numerous protected areas (PAs) have been created in Africa to safeguard wildlife and other natural resources. However, significant threats from anthropogenic activities and decline of wildlife populations persist, while conservation efforts in most PAs are still minimal. We assessed the impact level of the most common threats to wildlife within PAs in tropical Africa and the relationship of conservation activities with threat impact level. We collated data on 98 PAs with tropical forest cover from 15 countries across West, Central and East Africa. For this, we assembled information about local threats as well as conservation activities from published and unpublished literature, and questionnaires sent to long-term field workers. We constructed general linear models to test the significance of specific conservation activities in relation to the threat impact level. Subsistence and commercial hunting were identified as the most common direct threats to wildlife and found to be most prevalent in West and Central Africa. Agriculture and logging represented the most common indirect threats, and were most prevalent in West Africa. We found that the long-term presence of conservation activities (such as law enforcement, research and tourism) was associated with lower threat impact levels. Our results highlight deficiencies in the management effectiveness of several PAs across tropical Africa, and conclude that PA management should invest more into conservation activities with long-term duration.
Highlights
Tropical rainforests harbour a rich and unique biodiversity [1]
A total of 66 correlations between the threat impact levels were performed for the overall sample of 98 protected areas (PAs) (Table 3)
Our results indicate that only a few PAs in tropical Africa are better protected, in particular in East Africa, while the rest are under considerable pressure from anthropogenic threats, the types of threats and degrees of influence vary across regions
Summary
Tropical rainforests harbour a rich and unique biodiversity [1]. Though representing only 7% of land surface, they support more than 60% of all known species [2]. Increased human population growth and economic expansion have fostered the rapid expansion of two of the main threats to wildlife, habitat destruction and unsustainable hunting These disturbances have caused several declines in wildlife populations and have contributed to the degradation of many tropical forests [5, 6, 7]. Over the past 20–30 years, threats to African tropical forests in particular have attracted national and international attention. This has led to the creation of numerous protected areas (PAs), which are intended to conserve both fauna and flora, whilst benefitting neighbouring human communities [8, 9, 10]
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