PARENT SESSION
Friday, August 11, 8:00-11:30 am
COS 107 - Ecological education II: interdisciplinary and community education
L-4, Lobby Level, Cook Convention Center
Presiders: R Jordan

Is spatially structured hunting sustainable?

Camilo, Gerardo^*,, Williams-Guillen, Kimberly, Caruso, Nick,

ABSTRACT- Understanding how hunting practices are structured in space and time is a crucial part of community-based conservation for many reserves where indigenous people are part of the system. There has been significant amount of debate about the spatial structure of animal harvesting in the conservation literature. On one side, the empty-forest hypothesis suggest that spatial dependency in hunting can produce a significant decline animal populations resulting in a "top-down" loss of services like pollination and seed dispersal. Alternatively, other authors have suggested that the mortality associated with hunting increases population turnover and maximizes yield. This causes populations to produce more individuals with no significant loss of ecosystem services. We address this question with indigenous Miskito hunters from eleven of thirteen villages in the territory of Kipla Sait Tasbaika Kum in the BOSAWAS biosphere reserve in Nicaragua. A total of twenty-five hunters participated for a period of twelve months. All hunted animals were identified to species, weighted and specific kill sites were recorded with GPS. To have an idea of background population densities we established fourteen 1km transects at varying distances and land use types across the forest and surveyed monthly. We used geospatial analysis to determine if hunting was spatially structured, what was the type of structure and how animal populations responded to human settlements and hunting pressure.

Key words: traditional ecological knowledge, tropical rainforest, sustainble yields