Rural Wage-Earners’ Attitudes Towards Diverse Wildlife Groups Differ Between Tropical Ecoregions: Implications for Forest and Savanna Conservation in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

Understanding people’s attitudes towards wildlife species is key for developing and effectively implementing conservation initiatives. Although attitudes towards different wildlife classes have been examined separately within a variety of regions, there have been no comprehensive comparisons of attitudes towards wildlife between different tropical ecoregions over large spatial scales. Here, we examined attitudes of 106 rural wage-earners from two ecoregions in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. We used generalized Linear Models (GLMs) to examine the influence of socioeconomic variables and ecoregion type on attitudes towards wildlife species, grouped into three classes (liked, disliked, and damage income). Overall we obtained attitudes regarding 57 wildlife species that were organized into 11 faunal groups (amphibians, ants, bats, birds, fishes, medium-bodied mammals, large-bodied mammals, primates, snakes, tortoises and turtles, and other invertebrates). Ecoregions where wage-earners lived was the strongest predictor of the total number of liked and disliked wildlife species. The total number of species damaging income was explained by socioeconomic variables related to the number of people living in the property and level of education. Medium and large-bodied mammals were most frequently reported both as liked and causing damage, while snakes were most frequently reported as disliked in both ecoregions. Although socioeconomic variables were important predictors to wage-earners’ attitudes towards wildlife species, the environment (ecoregion) was the strongest predictor affecting human-wildlife attitudes. Our findings contribute with information about the importance of considering differences in local attitudes across a representative spectrum of wildlife species to inform the identification of effective focal species in different tropical regions.