Predicting defaunation: accurately mapping bushmeat hunting pressure over large areas

Author:

Deith Mairin C. M.1ORCID,Brodie Jedediah F.2ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, #4200-6270 University Boulevard 15, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z4

2. Division of Biological Sciences & Wildlife Biology Program, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812, USA

Abstract

Unsustainable hunting is emptying forests of large animals around the world, but current understanding of how human foraging spreads across landscapes has been stymied by data deficiencies and cryptic hunter behaviour. Unlike other global threats to biodiversity like deforestation, climate change and overfishing, maps of wild meat hunters' movements—often based on forest accessibility—typically cover small scales and are rarely validated with real-world observations. Using camera trapping data from rainforests across Malaysian Borneo, we show that while hunter movements are strongly correlated with the accessibility of different parts of the landscape, accessibility measures are most informative when they integrate fine-scale habitat features like topography and land cover. Measures of accessibility naive to fine-scale habitat complexity, like distance to the nearest road or settlement, generate poor approximations of hunters’ movements. In comparison, accessibility as measured by high-resolution movement models based on circuit theory provides vastly better reflections of real-world foraging movements. Our results highlight that simple models incorporating fine-scale landscape heterogeneity can be powerful tools for understanding and predicting widespread threats to biodiversity.

Funder

Canada Foundation for Innovation

University of British Columbia

University of Montana

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Panthera

Denver Zoo

Publisher

The Royal Society

Subject

General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Environmental Science,General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine

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