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<p>(<b>n = 224</b>) <b>and indices of patrol effort, hunting activity, ha... more <p>(<b>n = 224</b>) <b>and indices of patrol effort, hunting activity, habitat, and prey biomass in Mole National Park, Ghana.</b> (A) Index of law enforcement patrol effort (i.e., “protection”) calculated as the density of patrol pathways covered between Oct. 2006 and May 2008 (also showing the location of villages within 10 km of the park boundary); (B) NDVI, the normalized difference vegetation index (from MODIS/Terra sensor) summed over the study period (i.e., integrated NDVI, Oct. 2006 – Jan. 2009); (C) Index of illegal hunting activity detected by law enforcement patrols (observations per unit patrol effort); (D) Patrol-based, multi-season index of biomass for prey species weighing less than 18 kg (standardized by patrol effort). No data were obtained in the white areas within the park boundary.</p
Protected areas (PAs) are a cornerstone of global efforts to shield wildlife from anthropogenic i... more Protected areas (PAs) are a cornerstone of global efforts to shield wildlife from anthropogenic impacts, yet their effectiveness at protecting wide-ranging species prone to human conflict – notably mammalian carnivores – is increasingly in question. An understanding of carnivore responses to human-induced and natural changes in and around PAs is critical not only to the conservation of threatened carnivore populations, but also to the effective protection of ecosystems in which they play key functional roles. However, an important challenge to assessing carnivore communities is the often infrequent and imperfect nature of survey detections. We applied a novel hierarchical multi-species occupancy model that accounted for detectability and spatial autocorrelation to data from 224 camera trap stations (sampled between October 2006 and January 2009) in order to test hypotheses about extrinsic influences on carnivore community dynamics in a West African protected area (Mole National Park...
The African lion (Panthera leo) is an apex predator of great ecological and cultural significance... more The African lion (Panthera leo) is an apex predator of great ecological and cultural significance that increasingly is threatened by conflict with humans, particularly in West
A Thesis submitted to the Department of Wildlife and Range Management, Kwame Nkrumah University o... more A Thesis submitted to the Department of Wildlife and Range Management, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy, 2011
South African Journal of Wildlife Research, 2011
... Hugo Jachmann 1 * , Julian Blanc 2 , Cletus Nateg 3 , Cletus Balangtaa 3 , Edward Debrah 3 , ... more ... Hugo Jachmann 1 * , Julian Blanc 2 , Cletus Nateg 3 , Cletus Balangtaa 3 , Edward Debrah 3 , Fuseini Damma 3 , Eric Atta-Kusi 3 & Alex ... Moreover, locally based monitoring is consistently cheaper relative to the cost of management and professional monitoring (Danielsen et al. ...
South African Journal of Wildlife Research, 2011
... Hugo Jachmann 1 * , Julian Blanc 2 , Cletus Nateg 3 , Cletus Balangtaa 3 , Edward Debrah 3 , ... more ... Hugo Jachmann 1 * , Julian Blanc 2 , Cletus Nateg 3 , Cletus Balangtaa 3 , Edward Debrah 3 , Fuseini Damma 3 , Eric Atta-Kusi 3 & Alex ... Moreover, locally based monitoring is consistently cheaper relative to the cost of management and professional monitoring (Danielsen et al. ...
PLoS ONE, 2012
Protected areas (PAs) are a cornerstone of global efforts to shield wildlife from anthropogenic i... more Protected areas (PAs) are a cornerstone of global efforts to shield wildlife from anthropogenic impacts, yet their effectiveness at protecting wide-ranging species prone to human conflict -notably mammalian carnivores -is increasingly in question. An understanding of carnivore responses to human-induced and natural changes in and around PAs is critical not only to the conservation of threatened carnivore populations, but also to the effective protection of ecosystems in which they play key functional roles. However, an important challenge to assessing carnivore communities is the often infrequent and imperfect nature of survey detections. We applied a novel hierarchical multi-species occupancy model that accounted for detectability and spatial autocorrelation to data from 224 camera trap stations (sampled between October 2006 and January 2009) in order to test hypotheses about extrinsic influences on carnivore community dynamics in a West African protected area (Mole National Park, Ghana). We developed spatially explicit indices of illegal hunting activity, law enforcement patrol effort, prey biomass, and habitat productivity across the park, and used a Bayesian model selection framework to identify predictors of site occurrence for individual species and the entire carnivore community. Contrary to our expectation, hunting pressure and edge proximity did not have consistent, negative effects on occurrence across the nine carnivore species detected. Occurrence patterns for most species were positively associated with small prey biomass, and several species had either positive or negative associations with riverine forest (but not with other habitat descriptors). Influences of sampling design on carnivore detectability were also identified and addressed within our modeling framework (e.g., road and observer effects), and the multi-species approach facilitated inference on even the rarest carnivore species in the park. Our study provides insight for the conservation of these regionally significant carnivore populations, and our approach is broadly applicable to the robust assessment of communities of rare and elusive species subject to environmental change.
Biological Conservation, 2011
Carnivore extinctions frequently have cascading impacts through an ecosystem, so effective manage... more Carnivore extinctions frequently have cascading impacts through an ecosystem, so effective management of ecological communities requires an understanding of carnivore vulnerability. This has been hindered by the elusive nature of many carnivores, as well as a disproportionate focus on large-bodied species and particular geographic regions. We use multiple survey methods and a hierarchical multi-species occupancy model accounting for imperfect detection to assess extinction risk across the entire carnivore community in Ghana's Mole National Park, a poorly studied West African savanna ecosystem. Only 9 of 16 historically occurring carnivore species were detected in a camera-trap survey covering 253 stations deployed for 5469 trap days between October 2006 and January 2009, and our occupancy model indicated low overall likelihoods of false absence despite low per-survey probabilities of detection. Concurrent sign, call-in, and village surveys, as well as long-term law enforcement patrol records, provided more equivocal evidence of carnivore occurrence but supported the conclusion that many carnivores have declined and are likely functionally or fully extirpated from the park, including the top predator, lion (Panthera leo). Contrary to expectation, variation in carnivore persistence was not explained by ecological or life-history traits such as body size, home range size or fecundity, thus raising questions about the predictability of carnivore community disassembly. Our results imply an urgent need for new initiatives to better protect and restore West Africa's embattled carnivore populations, and they highlight a broader need for more empirical study of the response of entire carnivore communities to anthropogenic impact.
African Journal of Ecology, 2011
by Thomas Breuer, Alasdair R Harris, Stephen Blake, Charles-Albert Petre, Sandra Tranquilli, Fidèle Amsini, Tim Davenport, Colin A Chapman, Takeshi Furuichi, Kouame Paul Ngoran, Sebastien Regnaut, Cletus Balangtaa, Manasseh Eno-Nku, and Rebecca Chancellor
PLoS ONE
Numerous protected areas (PAs) have been created in Africa to safeguard wildlife and other natura... more Numerous protected areas (PAs) have been created in Africa to safeguard wildlife and other natural resources. However, significant threats from anthropogenic activities and decline of wildlife populations persist, while conservation efforts in most PAs are still minimal. We assessed the impact level of the most common threats to wildlife within PAs in tropical Africa and the relationship of conservation activities with threat impact level. We collated data on 98 PAs with tropical forest cover from 15 countries across West, Central and East Africa. For this, we assembled information about local threats as well as conservation activities from published and unpublished literature, and questionnaires sent to long-term field workers. We constructed general linear models to test the significance of specific conservation activities in relation to the threat impact level. Subsistence and commercial hunting were identified as the most common direct threats to wildlife and found to be most pr...
<p>(<b>n = 224</b>) <b>and indices of patrol effort, hunting activity, ha... more <p>(<b>n = 224</b>) <b>and indices of patrol effort, hunting activity, habitat, and prey biomass in Mole National Park, Ghana.</b> (A) Index of law enforcement patrol effort (i.e., “protection”) calculated as the density of patrol pathways covered between Oct. 2006 and May 2008 (also showing the location of villages within 10 km of the park boundary); (B) NDVI, the normalized difference vegetation index (from MODIS/Terra sensor) summed over the study period (i.e., integrated NDVI, Oct. 2006 – Jan. 2009); (C) Index of illegal hunting activity detected by law enforcement patrols (observations per unit patrol effort); (D) Patrol-based, multi-season index of biomass for prey species weighing less than 18 kg (standardized by patrol effort). No data were obtained in the white areas within the park boundary.</p
Protected areas (PAs) are a cornerstone of global efforts to shield wildlife from anthropogenic i... more Protected areas (PAs) are a cornerstone of global efforts to shield wildlife from anthropogenic impacts, yet their effectiveness at protecting wide-ranging species prone to human conflict – notably mammalian carnivores – is increasingly in question. An understanding of carnivore responses to human-induced and natural changes in and around PAs is critical not only to the conservation of threatened carnivore populations, but also to the effective protection of ecosystems in which they play key functional roles. However, an important challenge to assessing carnivore communities is the often infrequent and imperfect nature of survey detections. We applied a novel hierarchical multi-species occupancy model that accounted for detectability and spatial autocorrelation to data from 224 camera trap stations (sampled between October 2006 and January 2009) in order to test hypotheses about extrinsic influences on carnivore community dynamics in a West African protected area (Mole National Park...
The African lion (Panthera leo) is an apex predator of great ecological and cultural significance... more The African lion (Panthera leo) is an apex predator of great ecological and cultural significance that increasingly is threatened by conflict with humans, particularly in West
A Thesis submitted to the Department of Wildlife and Range Management, Kwame Nkrumah University o... more A Thesis submitted to the Department of Wildlife and Range Management, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy, 2011
South African Journal of Wildlife Research, 2011
... Hugo Jachmann 1 * , Julian Blanc 2 , Cletus Nateg 3 , Cletus Balangtaa 3 , Edward Debrah 3 , ... more ... Hugo Jachmann 1 * , Julian Blanc 2 , Cletus Nateg 3 , Cletus Balangtaa 3 , Edward Debrah 3 , Fuseini Damma 3 , Eric Atta-Kusi 3 & Alex ... Moreover, locally based monitoring is consistently cheaper relative to the cost of management and professional monitoring (Danielsen et al. ...
South African Journal of Wildlife Research, 2011
... Hugo Jachmann 1 * , Julian Blanc 2 , Cletus Nateg 3 , Cletus Balangtaa 3 , Edward Debrah 3 , ... more ... Hugo Jachmann 1 * , Julian Blanc 2 , Cletus Nateg 3 , Cletus Balangtaa 3 , Edward Debrah 3 , Fuseini Damma 3 , Eric Atta-Kusi 3 & Alex ... Moreover, locally based monitoring is consistently cheaper relative to the cost of management and professional monitoring (Danielsen et al. ...
PLoS ONE, 2012
Protected areas (PAs) are a cornerstone of global efforts to shield wildlife from anthropogenic i... more Protected areas (PAs) are a cornerstone of global efforts to shield wildlife from anthropogenic impacts, yet their effectiveness at protecting wide-ranging species prone to human conflict -notably mammalian carnivores -is increasingly in question. An understanding of carnivore responses to human-induced and natural changes in and around PAs is critical not only to the conservation of threatened carnivore populations, but also to the effective protection of ecosystems in which they play key functional roles. However, an important challenge to assessing carnivore communities is the often infrequent and imperfect nature of survey detections. We applied a novel hierarchical multi-species occupancy model that accounted for detectability and spatial autocorrelation to data from 224 camera trap stations (sampled between October 2006 and January 2009) in order to test hypotheses about extrinsic influences on carnivore community dynamics in a West African protected area (Mole National Park, Ghana). We developed spatially explicit indices of illegal hunting activity, law enforcement patrol effort, prey biomass, and habitat productivity across the park, and used a Bayesian model selection framework to identify predictors of site occurrence for individual species and the entire carnivore community. Contrary to our expectation, hunting pressure and edge proximity did not have consistent, negative effects on occurrence across the nine carnivore species detected. Occurrence patterns for most species were positively associated with small prey biomass, and several species had either positive or negative associations with riverine forest (but not with other habitat descriptors). Influences of sampling design on carnivore detectability were also identified and addressed within our modeling framework (e.g., road and observer effects), and the multi-species approach facilitated inference on even the rarest carnivore species in the park. Our study provides insight for the conservation of these regionally significant carnivore populations, and our approach is broadly applicable to the robust assessment of communities of rare and elusive species subject to environmental change.
Biological Conservation, 2011
Carnivore extinctions frequently have cascading impacts through an ecosystem, so effective manage... more Carnivore extinctions frequently have cascading impacts through an ecosystem, so effective management of ecological communities requires an understanding of carnivore vulnerability. This has been hindered by the elusive nature of many carnivores, as well as a disproportionate focus on large-bodied species and particular geographic regions. We use multiple survey methods and a hierarchical multi-species occupancy model accounting for imperfect detection to assess extinction risk across the entire carnivore community in Ghana's Mole National Park, a poorly studied West African savanna ecosystem. Only 9 of 16 historically occurring carnivore species were detected in a camera-trap survey covering 253 stations deployed for 5469 trap days between October 2006 and January 2009, and our occupancy model indicated low overall likelihoods of false absence despite low per-survey probabilities of detection. Concurrent sign, call-in, and village surveys, as well as long-term law enforcement patrol records, provided more equivocal evidence of carnivore occurrence but supported the conclusion that many carnivores have declined and are likely functionally or fully extirpated from the park, including the top predator, lion (Panthera leo). Contrary to expectation, variation in carnivore persistence was not explained by ecological or life-history traits such as body size, home range size or fecundity, thus raising questions about the predictability of carnivore community disassembly. Our results imply an urgent need for new initiatives to better protect and restore West Africa's embattled carnivore populations, and they highlight a broader need for more empirical study of the response of entire carnivore communities to anthropogenic impact.
African Journal of Ecology, 2011
by Thomas Breuer, Alasdair R Harris, Stephen Blake, Charles-Albert Petre, Sandra Tranquilli, Fidèle Amsini, Tim Davenport, Colin A Chapman, Takeshi Furuichi, Kouame Paul Ngoran, Sebastien Regnaut, Cletus Balangtaa, Manasseh Eno-Nku, and Rebecca Chancellor
PLoS ONE
Numerous protected areas (PAs) have been created in Africa to safeguard wildlife and other natura... more Numerous protected areas (PAs) have been created in Africa to safeguard wildlife and other natural resources. However, significant threats from anthropogenic activities and decline of wildlife populations persist, while conservation efforts in most PAs are still minimal. We assessed the impact level of the most common threats to wildlife within PAs in tropical Africa and the relationship of conservation activities with threat impact level. We collated data on 98 PAs with tropical forest cover from 15 countries across West, Central and East Africa. For this, we assembled information about local threats as well as conservation activities from published and unpublished literature, and questionnaires sent to long-term field workers. We constructed general linear models to test the significance of specific conservation activities in relation to the threat impact level. Subsistence and commercial hunting were identified as the most common direct threats to wildlife and found to be most pr...