Automated Behavioural Response (ABR) systems for conducting the first ever global experimental assessment of the threat poaching poses to tropical biodiversity

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Poaching is thought to be one of the two main causes of biodiversity loss but there has been no tool to systematically quantify this, with estimates relying upon questionnaires that are intrinsically unreliable because they require respondents to confess to crimes. Animals know their enemies; zebras flee lions, gazelles flee cheetahs, and those humans hunt flee us. Measuring the degree to which animals perceive humans as a threat, by testing if they flee the sound of humans, hunting dogs or gunshots can reveal which are hunted and how intensively; and crucially, animals have no reason to lie about this. The “ecology of fear” is the focus of my research program and I have consistently successfully published papers in top journals (e.g. Science, Nature Communications), that attract international media attention, demonstrating that fear itself, including the fear of humans, is powerful enough to affect population- and ecosystem-level processes. I designed the globally-unique Automated Behavioural Response (ABR) systems for experimentally testing the responses of wildlife to poaching requested herein, and their effectiveness and the merit of the proposed research have already been verified in papers in Methods in Ecology and Evolution and Behavioral Ecology. I am requesting funds from NSERC for 80 ABRs. I urgently require this equipment critical to my seizing the opportunity to lead the first ever global experimental assessment of the threat poaching poses to tropical biodiversity; to be conducted in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution, Conservation International, the Wildlife Conservation Society and Oxford U.’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit. My proposed research program holds the promise of a major advance in the discipline and a transformation in protected areas management, providing managers for the first time with a tool (the ABR) to accurately diagnose the extent of poaching and thus the certain knowledge of the resources needed to combat it. To seize this extraordinary opportunity I require 100 ABRs to conduct replicated experiments at 10 research sites around the world, operated by my international collaborators. Because of the urgency of the need to initiate the proposed research, and its recognized merit, I have been awarded a $50,000 Research Accelerator grant from my university, to purchase 20 ABRs, and offset the costs entailed in deploying all 100 ABR systems. I have recruited a new Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Scholarship PhD student from Uganda to help lead this research, whose work cannot proceed without the requested equipment; and I will provide hands-on training in the use of this innovative new research tool (the ABR) to a minimum of 10 undergraduate and graduate students per year, who will thus be educated in marketable skills needed in careers in conservation research, protected areas management, tourism, governmental policy making and academia.