Assessment of wildlife abundance indicators, human activities and their dependence on development projects in the Campo-Ma'an National Park, Southern Cameroon

Abstract

The accumulation of projects in the vicinity of protected areas can influence the density and abundance of the wildlife species they contain, thereby contributing to the failure to achieve management objectives. The aim of this study is to analyse changes in indicators of wildlife abundance and human activity within the Campo-Ma'an National Park and to assess their dependence on the development projects implemented, in order to take into account the pressures the park is experiencing as a result of their accumulation.To do this, an analysis of the content of 08 documents shows that variations in the number of individuals and kilometre index of abundance of critical species are decreasing, from 335, 1304, 16898 and 0. 1 in 2008 to 114, 718 and 0.012 in 2020 for elephants, great apes and mandrills respectively. Dependency analysis using SPSS shows that elephants, great apes and mandrills have dependencies of -0.722, -0.276 and − 0.596 respectively with the different projects implemented. Analysis of the changes in the human activity indicators shows that they are increasing and that there is a strong dependence on the number of projects, of the order of 0.913. It is therefore necessary to improve the implementation of projects in order for the Park to fulfil its role as a protected area.