Quantifying spatial patterns of game vertebrate abundance in Amazonian forests through local ecological knowledge-based methods

Abstract

Assessing local anthropogenic impacts on tropical forest wildlife is central to conservation science in low-governance regions, particularly in the context of community-based resource management. Two methods frequently used to sample wildlife are based on local ecological knowledge (LEK), which is low cost and draws on substantial human experience, and camera trap sampling (CT), which is widely used due to its spatial replicability and the increasing diversity of analytical frameworks. We compared the effectiveness of both methods in assessing the impact of hunting on wildlife at 70 local community catchments across the Brazilian Amazon. We did this by assessing local occurrences of 17 focal species as recounted by 187 subsistence hunters in interviews and by assessing data from 631 CT deployments. We evaluated correlations among the distances from the nearest community at which species and species groups occurred, derived from either LEK or CT data. We also assessed how species' morphological and socioecological traits influenced estimates derived from LEK and CT. Estimates derived from LEK were more strongly correlated with species abundance than with occupancy estimates. Large-bodied, harvest-sensitive species, such as tapir (Tapirus terrestris), white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari), and curassow (Crax or Pauxi spp.), were spatially depleted more than 15 km away from human communities. These species showed particularly strong positive correlations across all estimates. The precision of LEK estimates increased with independent data on local game species abundance. These results underline the utility of data derived from LEK in assessing patterns of local wildlife abundance, especially for large-bodied species sensitive to hunting pressure. Local ecological knowledge-based methods are valuable in their own right, especially in areas where alternative sampling methods are lacking and human impact is not matched by conservation efforts.