When University of Michigan wildlife ecologist Nyeema Harris started her multiyear camera survey of West African wildlife, she sought to understand interactions between mammals and people in protected areas such as national parks.
When University of Michigan wildlife ecologist Nyeema Harris started her multiyear camera survey of West African wildlife, she sought to understand interactions between mammals and people in protected areas such as national parks.
She expected those interactions to include lots of poaching. Instead, livestock grazing and the gathering of forest products were among the most common human-related activities her cameras captured, while poaching was actually the rarest.
“The common narrative in conservation, particularly in the tropics and African savannas, is the persistent threat of poaching and bushmeat hunting on wildlife and environmental integrity,” said Harris, an assistant professor in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and director of the department’s Applied Wildlife Ecology Lab, which is known as the AWE lab.
“Therefore, we expected to document heavy poaching activity in our camera survey,” she said. “Instead, livestock grazing was the dominant human pressure, and the gathering of forest products—such as wood, grasses and fruit—was the primary human activity that we observed in these protected areas.
Read more at University of Michigan
Photo Credit: IanZA via Pixabay
