Impacts of Roads and Hunting on Central African Rainforest Mammals

Abstract

Road expansion and associated increases in hunting pressure are a rapidly growing threat to African tropical wildlife. In the rainforests of southern Gabon, we compared abundances of larger (>1 kg) mammal species at varying distances from forest roads and between hunted and unhunted treatments (com-paring

The changing fates of the world's mammals

“…Mammalian diversity and abundance have been rapidly depleted in the face of threats such as habitat loss (due mainly to expanding agriculture and logging) and overexploitation, nowhere more so than in Southeast Asia [10,11], where the populations of many large mammal species number less than 100 individuals (and some, such as Kouprey Bos sauveli, may already be extinct). The prevalence of certain threats, such as hunting, compounded by the ecological traits of some species (large body size; low density; large home range size; migratory or nomadic movements), means declines are taking place even in protected areas [12,13] and within the great expanses of tropical wilderness [14,15]. Consequently, many mammals have current ranges dramatically reduced from their historical extent [16][17][18].…”

New Range Limits of the Sun-Tailed Monkey,Cercopithecus solatus, in Central Gabon

“…Most of the area of occurrence of the sun-tailed guenon apart from the protected areas is now under timber exploitation, with the result that the logging road network has penetrated almost all of its range. Roads provide easy access to local and commercial bushmeat hunters in the region and are strongly associated with wildlife depletion in Central Africa and in the range fragmentation of a number of species (Blake et al 2008;Laurance et al 2006;Minnemeyer et al 2002;Stokes et al 2010;Wilkie et al 2000). Thus, the IUCN Red Listing status of the sun-tailed guenon should remain as Vulnerable B1ab(v), despite the increase in the size of its extent of occurrence detailed in this paper.…”

Causes of habitat loss in a Neotropical landscape: The Panama Canal corridor

“…Data were interpolated for each subregion and verified by experts from the government. As Laurance et al (2002a) did, we distinguished urban and rural populations, because urban population size and density are far greater than their rural counterparts, and both affect habitat loss in different ways (Laurance et al, 2001(Laurance et al, , 2002a(Laurance et al, , 2006. We used population size, not density, for urbanized areas because the latter was much less variable than the former.…”

“…Studies of birds, for example, show that both fragmentation and habitat loss reduce diversity (Robinson et al, 2000(Robinson et al, , 2004Laurance et al, 2002b;Gaston et al, 2003;Waltert et al, 2005;Rompre et al, 2007). Major factors associated with fragmentation and habitat loss, and therefore loss of biodiversity, are high levels of human population density (Cincotta et al, 2000;McKee et al, 2003;Scharlemann et al, 2004), density of roads (Maki et al, 2001;Laurance et al, 2002aLaurance et al, , 2006Gutzwiller and Barrow, 2003;Glennon and Porter, 2005), changes in agricultural practices (Meyer and Turner, 1992;Huston, 1993), logging (Kohleretal., 2002;Rudel, 2005), and hunting (Brashares et al, 2001;Laurance et al, 2006).…”