Responses of carnivore assemblages to decentralized conservation approaches in a South African landscape

Abstract

Conservation efforts in South Africa play out across multi‐use landscapes where formal protected areas coexist with private wildlife business (ecotourism and/or hunting) in a human‐dominated matrix. Despite the persistence of highly diverse carnivore guilds, management idiosyncrasies are often orientated towards charismatic large predators and assemblage‐level patterns remain largely unexplored. We conducted an extensive camera‐trap survey in a natural quasi‐experimental setting in KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa. We sampled across a protection gradient characterized by a provincial protected area (highest and formal protection status), a private ecotourism reserve, game ranches and traditional communal areas (lowest protected status). We evaluated assemblage‐level and species‐specific responses of free‐ranging carnivores to the varying management contexts and associated environmental gradients. Despite similar assemblage composition between management contexts, site‐scale carnivore richness and occupancy rates were greater in the formal protected area than adjacent private reserve and game ranches. Carnivore occupancy was more similar between these private wildlife areas, although putative problem species were more common in the private reserve, and contrasted with depauperate assemblages in least protected communal lands. Variation in carnivore occupancy probabilities was largely driven by land use contexts, that is, the level and nature of protection, relative to underlying fine‐scale landscape attributes (e.g. distance to conservation fences) or apex predator populations. Synthesis and applications. Our findings provide convincing empirical support for the added value of multi‐tenure conservation estates augmenting and connecting South Africa's protected areas. However, our emphasis on free‐ranging carnivores exemplifies the importance of maintaining areas under long‐term formal protection and the risks with viewing lucrative wildlife business as a conservation panacea. We suggest that unmanaged carnivore species be the formal components of carnivore reintroduction and recovery programmes to better gauge the complementary conservation role of South Africa's private land.

Mesocarnivore community structuring in the presence of Africa's apex predator

“…This is perhaps expected as most of the species we encountered are widely distributed in the region, and as versatile and habitat generalist species [20], possess broader bioclimatic niches. Moreover, reserves are not discrete units within a completely hostile landscape matrix and fences are permeable to most carnivore species [65]. Even land now protected in each reserve was, in many cases, highly disturbed prior to the growth of South Africa's wildlife industry, potentially inducing unaccounted historical 'extinction filters' [66].…”

Patterns and Drivers of Rodent Abundance across a South African Multi-Use Landscape

“…Variables of ungulate pressure and human disturbance were collected from Curveira-Santos et al [ 12 ] camera-trap surveys. Cameras, located in the center of the Y formation, were active for 60–90 days, and attached to a tree or metal stake, 30 cm above the ground, without any bait and set to photograph at minimum delay (1 s for daytime and 30 s for night-time) (see [ 12 ] for details). Each of the defined ink-tunnel clusters (i.e., one cluster includes nine ink tunnels and one camera-trap; Figure 1 c) were spaced approximately 1.4 km apart ( Figure 1 b).…”

“…Often, these wildlife-oriented land uses are surrounded by human-dominated areas with high levels of anthropogenic disturbance. The regional co-existence of all these land uses generates complex multi-tenured landscapes, usually divided by semi-permeable wildlife fences, influencing the biodiversity supported by each of these land uses [ 12 ].…”

“…Although the processes that regulate small mammals’ spatial distribution are known for some landscapes (e.g., woodland [ 29 ] and mixed forest [ 36 ]), there is a lack of information regarding the drivers of rodent-abundance patterns in African savannas (but see [ 9 , 37 ]), as well as how these vary across different management schemes. Here, we evaluated the variation in rodent abundance across three adjacent management contexts, spanning a private ecotourism game reserve, mixed farms and communally owned land, managed by Zulu tribal authorities [ 12 ], under the following two main objectives: (1) to estimate heterogeneity in small-mammal-abundance distribution (mean abundance and patchiness) across management contexts (game reserve, mixed farms and communal lands); and (2) to determine the main, fine-scale environmental factors affecting small-mammal-abundance patterns across land-use types. These objectives were tested in two size-based rodent groups, for a more detailed assessment of ecological responses.…”

Quantifying the checks and balances of decentralised governance systems for adaptive carnivore management

“…Decentralised governance systems, whereby a range of actors at local, regional and national levels participate in decision-making (Sandström et al, 2009;Hansson-Forman et al, 2018), is becoming increasingly common in the management of large carnivore populations (Treves et al, 2009;Redpath et al, 2017;Sandström et al, 2018;Curveira-Santos et al, 2020;Lute et al, 2020). Such a governance system is typically characterised by a set of administrative and political institutions whose interactions and collective decision-making aim to increase the legitimacy of management and ensure population targets are met (Pellikka & Sandström, 2011;Risvoll et al, 2016;Sandström & Lundmark, 2016).…”