here - Joshua M. Linder
Transcription
here - Joshua M. Linder
Acoustic Monitoring: Transforming Primate Conservation Strategies in African Tropical Forest Protected Areas JOSHUA M. LINDER1, CHRISTOS ASTARAS2, PETER WREGE3, and DAVID W. MACDONALD2. 1Department of Sociology and Anthropology, James Madison University ([email protected]), 2WildCRU, University of Oxford, 3Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University Partners and Funding: GUN HUNTING INTENSITY & TEMPORAL PATTERNS THE PROBLEM Hunting of wild animals to supply a growing commercial trade in bushmeat is leading to declines of wildlife in many African tropical forest protected areas. Anti-poaching patrols have been largely unable to curtail illegal hunting due, in part, to an inability to properly evaluate the patrol’s impact on hunting and wildlife abundance and to adjust patrol activity based on changing hunting patterns. Annual/seasonal gun hunting patterns Year 2: 2,050 gunshots recorded 0.55 shots/day/sensor Year 1: 1,954 gunshots recorded 0.49 shots/day/sensor Xmas/New Years OUR OBJECTIVE Daily gun hunting activity Develop, test, and provide training for an evidence-based, decision-support system to help design and assess the efficacy of anti-poaching patrols using a novel application of passive acoustic monitoring techniques to quantify spatial and temporal patterns of gun hunting activity. Weekly gun hunting patterns >65% of gun hunting occurs at night WHAT WE DID & WHERE WE DID IT 1 3 2 4 Market day GUN HUNTING OFFTAKE Concurrent hunter surveys (weekly offtakes; 30 hunters from 3 villages) Deployed 12 autonomous recording units (ARUs) in the tropical forest of Cameroon’s Korup National Park (1,260 km2) for 2 years (June 2013 – May 2015) 1,954 gunshots recorded in Year 1 Total detection area = 54 km2 Extrapolated to 2,146 annual gunshots (adjusted for days per month the sensors did not operate) Hunter success rate = 75% Primates = ~14% of gun hunting offtake This is an ARU. It has a gunshot detection radius of 1.2 km and a detection area of 4.5 km2. Gun hunting accounts for 77% of the total annual offtake Therefore… Each ARU continuously records sounds (24 hrs/day; 365 days/yr) at a 4 kHz sampling rate, capable of capturing gunshots and animal vocalizations. Acoustic data, in the form of .wav files, are stored directly to SD flash memory cards in the ARU, which are changed when batteries are replaced every 3 months. 185,353 hrs of sound data were collected Gunshots Red colobus calls Quantified spatio-temporal patterns of gun hunting by locating sound signatures of gunshots in sound files Scanned sound files and tagged candidate gunshots using an automatic detector in RavenPro® software; experts and hunters manually screened potential gunshots to exclude similar sounds Determined detection range of ARUs from an analysis of controlled gunshots from known distances to the ARU 1,609 animals shot annually in 54 km2 study area 30 animals shot / km2 >37,000 animals shot annually in all of Korup NP >5,000 primates killed annually WHY THIS MATTERS Acoustic monitoring provides unprecedented level of detail on spatial and temporal patterns of gun hunting, which can be used to: design, evaluate, and adapt anti-poaching patrols By using acoustic monitoring to establish a baseline for gun hunting activity, protected area managers can then assess how different antipoaching patrol strategies influence spatio-temporal gun hunting patterns. We are currently testing the efficacy of different antipoaching patrol strategies in Korup NP. Scan to download .pdf of poster