Paraecology for Community Bushmeat Hunting Monitoring, Modelling, and Management

Self-determined community hunting governance and management is increasingly promoted as a key pathway towards the equitable sustainability of wild food systems, vital to the well-being of Indigenous peoples and local communities and the conservation of biodiversity. Yet there is scant scientific research providing robust, quantitative evidence of a community approach. Here I present the creation and use of a novel community bushmeat monitoring program to address this need across twenty villages in northeastern Gabon. Paraecologists conducted standardized monitoring of bushmeat, and hundreds of hunters conducted GPS self-follows mapping village hunting catchments. I integrated these data to estimate the proportion of bushmeat sampled and make robust extrapolations of total offtake across space and time, estimating an annual offtake of ~30,000 animals of >56 species across all villages.

Such community- and landscape- level SES dynamics are the aggregate of individual motivation for the use of CPRs, which can be fluid, with the line between subsistence and commercial often unclear and in flux. I applied hierarchical Bayesian structural equation modelling to 910 hunts from 111 gun and trap hunters across nine villages. I first establish the human behaviour driving gun-hunting and trapping success and predict its effect on offtake across villages, and then linked fluid motivation of gun hunters to their behaviour, number of animals hunted, biomass yielded, and income earned. Gun hunts across villages yielded more animals during the night than the day, and when hunters brought high amounts of ammunition and walked far distances from villages. Gun hunts were less successful when coupled with trapping while per-hunt success of trapping itself was generally low and difficult to predict. Fluid gun hunters hunted fewer animals when motivated strictly by subsistence, despite no reduction in ammunition brought or distance walked, while offtake from strictly commercial versus mixed motivation was the same. Numbers of animals hunted, biomass, and income were tightly linked.

In ten villages, the project facilitated community exploration of self-determined bushmeat hunting management, which three villages established. I used the paraecology data to quantify changes in offtake in these three villages in relation to fourteen other villages over the same period, and enriched insight in changes in offtake with participatory data analyses, long-term community engagement, and a mixed quantitative-qualitative survey of hunters’ perceived quality of their governance. The three communities created from three to nine different management rules, including no-hunting reserves and limits on ammunition and traps. Different management strategies in two villages both caused reductions in offtake of „ 400 animals a year; scaling up to 10–30% of Gabon’s total ~2500 villages could reduce national offtake by ~100,000–300,00 animals a year, with widespread community reserves driving substantial growth of wildlife populations. Hunters generally perceived the governance of their hunting management as high quality, though perceptions of conformity to rules and overall success varied across villages and hunters. Hunters perceived a lack of state support in their management; research and policy both should pay further attention to the governance of hunting management and the enabling conditions needed to improve it across SESs.