Participatory monitoring reveals village-centered gradients of mammalian defaunation in central Africa
Participatory monitoring reveals village-centered gradients of mammalian defaunation in central Africa
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DOI：
10.1016/j.biocon.2019.02.035
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发表时间：
2019-05-01
影响因子：
5.9
通讯作者：
Poulsen, John R.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Beirne, Christopher;Meier, Amelia C.;Poulsen, John R.
热带地区正面临森林猎物危机，涉及出于生存和商业目的而系统性地过度开发大型哺乳动物。我们假设，由于狩猎通常起源于村庄，因此它会产生“动物区系丧失的光环”，大型哺乳动物的数量随着远离村庄而增加。虽然这些模式在景观尺度上得到了很好的表征，但研究不同村庄之间的动物区系丧失光环如何变化却受到的关注要少得多。村庄周围的森林对于居住在其中的人们来说非常重要，并且假设影响当地动物区系丧失光环的因素（例如村庄规模、狩猎习惯和进入当地市场的机会）可能会影响当地的生计和附近森林的生态完整性。为了解决这个问题，我们采用了参与式方法，在加蓬建立并监测了跨越 10 个村庄距离梯度（1-8 公里）的 60 条样线。从当地村庄招募的训练有素的副生态学家，每月在每个横断面行走两次，以确定村庄距离梯度上中型和大型哺乳动物的遭遇率，并监测村庄一级森林猎物的供应情况。我们发现，在整个村庄距离梯度上，哺乳动物观察的总体率和估计的物种丰富度是恒定的，但靠近村庄的遭遇个体总数和森林猎物生物量较低，这与当地野生动物的枯竭相一致。这些总体趋势的基础是，随着距离村庄越来越近，哺乳动物物种多样性不断减少，以及哺乳动物群落组成发生显着变化：在村庄附近最常遇到小型、非猎杀物种，而在远离村庄的地方最常遇到大型、被猎杀物种。我们发现了一些证据表明村庄间动物区系丧失光环的强度和深度存在差异，这可能部分是由村庄一级的狩猎强度驱动的。景观规模森林猎物研究中确定的几个关键参数并未明显影响村庄一级的动物区系丧失（例如道路或市场距离）。尽管丛林肉狩猎在该地区盛行，但通过在大部分调查地点检测到受保护问题的大型物种（例如黑猩猩和大猩猩），证明了村庄周围森林的保护价值。此处详述的哺乳动物群落的组成变化将最终导致村庄周围森林的组成和多样性发生变化，对人类生计、健康和人畜共患疾病的传播产生潜在影响。这项研究还证明了让副生态学家参与回答重点生态问题的有效性——这是促进当地社区有效管理自然资源的第一步。
Tropical areas are facing a bushmeat crisis involving the systematic over-exploitation of large-bodied mammals for both subsistence and commercial purposes. We hypothesize that because hunting generally originates from villages, it will create "halos of defaunation" where abundances of large mammals increase with distance away from villages. Whilst such patterns have been well characterized at the landscape scale, examining how de-faunation halos vary between different villages has received considerably less attention. Forests immediately surrounding villages are of considerable importance to the people residing within them and the factors hypothesized to influence local defaunation halos (e.g. village size, hunting practices and access to local markets) may affect local livelihoods and the ecological integrity of nearby forests. To address this, we adopted a participatory approach to establish and monitor sixty transects across ten village-distance gradients (1-8 km) in Gabon. Trained paraecologists, recruited from local villages, walked each transect twice monthly to determine the encounter rates of medium and large mammals across the village distance gradient and monitored village level bushmeat availability.We found that overall rates of mammal observation and estimated species richness were constant across the village-distance gradient, however the total number of individuals encountered and bushmeat biomass were lower close to villages consistent with local depletion of wildlife. These general trends were underpinned by depleted mammal species diversity with increasing proximity to villages and a marked shift in mammal community composition: small, non-hunted species were encountered most frequently near villages, whereas large, hunted species were encountered most frequently away from villages. We found some evidence for inter-village variation in the strength and depth of defaunation halos, which may be driven in part by the village-level hunting intensity. Several of the key parameters identified in landscape-scale bushmeat studies did not detectably influence village-level defaunation (e.g. road or market distance). Despite the prevalence of bushmeat hunting in the region, the conservation value of forests immediately surrounding villages was demonstrated through the detection of large-bodied species of conservation concern (e.g. chimpanzee and gorilla) at a high proportion of survey locations.The compositional shifts in mammal communities detailed here will ultimately lead to the altered composition and diversity of forests around villages, with potential implications for human livelihoods, health and transmission of zoonotic disease. This research also demonstrates the effectiveness of engaging paraecologists to answer focused ecological questions - the first step in facilitating effective natural resource management by local communities.