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. Furthermore, the relative strength and depth of the defaunation halos should be related to village size, hunting practices and access to local markets. To address this, we established sixty transects across a village-distance gradient in northern Gabon. Trained paraecologists walked the transects twice monthly to determine the relative availability of bushmeat across the village distance gradient, and also monitored bushmeat availability in the surrounding villages.
Results/Conclusions
We find evidence for a striking shift in mammal community composition: small non-hunted species proliferate around villages, whereas large hunted species decline significantly. The compositional shifts in mammal communities reduced the amount of bushmeat ‘available’ for exploitation and will likely lead to the altered composition and diversity of forests around villages as ecological functions are degraded through hunting. Finally, this research demonstrates the effectiveness of utilizing paraecologists to answer focused ecological questions and acts as the first step in a framework which would facilitate local communities to begin to manage their natural resources effectively.