Abstract
AbstractHuman activity in African tropical rainforests continues to threaten wild mammals. Many rural communities are dependent on hunting, yet there is a widespread lack of baseline data on ecology and the sustainability of hunting. We investigated the impacts of human activity on mammal species composition and distributions within a community forest surrounding a village in the buffer zone of the Dja Biosphere Reserve in south-east Cameroon. We conducted a camera-trap survey in August–November 2017 and detected 24 mammal species, including Critically Endangered western lowland gorilla Gorilla gorilla gorilla, Endangered central African chimpanzee Pan troglodytes troglodytes and Endangered tree pangolin Phataginus tricuspis. We used occupancy analysis to explore relationships between indicators of human activity (distance to a road and the Reserve), habitat quality (distance to the river and tree cover) and the distributions of species. We found that the local distribution of threatened mammals was not apparently limited by human activity, and proximity to the road did not negatively influence occupancy for any species. However, most of the Reserve's large species were not detected, including the African forest elephant Loxodonta cyclotis and the largest ungulates, and the occupancy of two species commonly hunted for wild meat was positively correlated with distance from the village, indicating hunting may be unsustainable. Our results show that the community forest provides habitat for threatened species outside the Reserve and in close proximity to people. However, effective conservation management will require continued monitoring and research to determine whether current rates of hunting are sustainable.
Highlights
Wild mammals are facing an uncertain future as a result of human activity, with c. % threatened with extinction (Hoffmann et al, )
Our research focuses on mammals within a community forest that surrounds a village on the southern periphery of the Dja Biosphere Reserve in Cameroon
The expected community was based on species whose distributions coincided with our study area according to Kingdon ( ) and the IUCN Red List (IUCN, ), were likely to be detected by ground-level camera traps within continuous forest in this area based on species ecology and habitat preferences, and were detected by camera-trap surveys in similar habitat within the Reserve (Bruce et al, a,c) or in community forests to the north-east (Lhoest et al, )
Summary
Wild mammals are facing an uncertain future as a result of human activity, with c. % threatened with extinction (Hoffmann et al, ). Wild mammals are facing an uncertain future as a result of human activity, with c. With the continued rise in the human population and consequent demand for forest products, rainforest species are likely to face increasing pressure (Fa et al, ; United Nations, ). Subsistence hunting of rainforest mammals for food and commercial hunting for livelihoods remain important (Nasi et al, ; Ziegler et al, ). Some of the most threatened mammals have high economic value and are subject to hunting for illegal trade (Wasser et al, ; Ingram et al, ). The scale of commercial hunting in forests has increased for several reasons, including increased urban demand for wild meat (bushmeat), human population density and access via roads (e.g. Robinson & Bennett, ; Ziegler et al, ; Fa et al, )
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