The proposed dissertation is designed to provide quantitative and qualitative information on the ecological, cultural, nutritional, and economic aspects of wildlife consumption to people living adjacent to the Makira Protected Area (MPA), Madagascar. In order to properly address this multidisciplinary project, it is necessary to understand the status of wildlife through accurate population modeling and the impacts of hunter harvest on the demographics of primate communities. With additional funding from the DDIG, a stochastic, stage-structured population viability analysis (PVA) will be conducted to model both the impact of demographic-specific hunter harvest and landcover change on population trends of ten lemur species with available life history data in RAMAS GIS 5.0 (Akçakaya 2006). Other PVAs that have addressed the issue of harvest impact on mammals in developing countries have often made assumptions on the demographics of harvested populations based on expert opinion. Specifically, these models assume an even sex ratio for the harvested population and that only the adult stage is affected by harvest. Previous work in this region (Golden 2009) used a simplistic model (Robinson & Redford 1991) which made a variety of assumptions that may not reflect real-world conditions. Using funds from the DDIG, the investigator will be able to collect new data on the stage structure and sex ratio of harvested animals through participatory research with local hunters in order to construct the most data-driven population models. It is necessary to understand the impact of hunting on shaping primate community viability in Madagascar to help inform the policy interventions and conservation planning currently in motion.
Ecosystem service valuations are useful to conservation and development practitioners for calculating the total value of benefits from ecosystems, choosing between alternative land use or management scenarios, ascertaining the distribution of the costs and benefits of services to users, and identifying or developing financing mechanisms for ecosystem services. We use the case of wildlife harvest and consumption in northeastern Madagascar to identify the distribution of these benefits to further our understanding of local reliance on natural resources. We found that the revenue from wildlife provisioning represented 12-37% of median annual household income in local communities. When adjusting for the impact of conservation monitoring and enforcement, the economic value of wildlife to households was reduced on average by two thirds and the biomass of bushmeat received by households was reduced by one half. Further, when examining the impact of conservation measures on the flow of benefits to households, policy enforcement could incur a negative flow value where costs exceed benefits. Through our analysis of the disproportionate benefits of these services to local people, conservation practitioners may better understand the heterogeneity of local people's incentives for conservation. These fine-scale differences between communities and households can also be used by public health and development specialists to allocate sparse funds to support regions, households or individuals most vulnerable to changes in access to wildlife. This valuation framework highlights the local importance of this service, but still ignores the cultural, ecological and health value of wildlife and wild meat to local people. Terrestrial wildlife is the primary source of meat for hundreds of millions of people throughout the developing world. Despite widespread human reliance on wildlife for food, the impact of wildlife depletion on human health remains poorly understood. Here we studied a prospective longitudinal cohort of 77 pre-adolescent children (under twelve years of age) in rural northeastern Madagascar and show that consuming more wildlife was associated with significantly higher hemoglobin concentrations. Our empirical models demonstrate that removing access to wildlife would induce a 29% increase in the numbers of children suffering from anemia and a tripling of anemia cases among children in the poorest households. The well-known progression from anemia to future disease demonstrate the powerful and far-reaching effects of lost wildlife access on a variety of human health outcomes, including cognitive, motor and physical deficits. Loss of access to wildlife could arise either from the diligent enforcement of existing conservation policy or from unbridled unsustainable harvest leading to depletion. Conservation enforcement would enact a more rapid restriction of resources, but self-depletion would potentially lead, albeit more slowly, both to irrevocable local population extinctions and loss of the harvested resource. Our research quantifies costs of reduced access to wildlife for rural communities in Madagascar and provides evidence linking global trends in biodiversity loss to declines in childhood health. I have already authored and co-authored a paper in PNAS detailing these results, and have papers in review at Conservation Biology and two at PLoS ONE. During the spring of 2011, I served as a teaching assistant for Dr. Art Reingold in a public health course entitled Global Health. This was incredibly valuable to me in exposing me to a broad array of important topics and methods relevant to global health. Further, I was able to gain experience in this type of teaching that will be very helpful to me in the near future. I received a post-doctoral fellowship to work as an Environmental Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, working jointly with Dr. Sam Myers (Harvard Medical School) and Dr. Walter Willett (Harvard School of Public Health). We are almost finished teaching a new course at the HSPH entitled Global Environmental Change and Food Production and this course has gone extraordinarily well. We are reaching an incredibly diverse audience with students who are undergraduates and members of several graduate disciplines: School of Public Health, Medical School, Kennedy School of Government, Business School and Law School. I am also currently serving as the thesis advisor to two Harvard Undergraduates: one who will be coming to work on my research with me this summer and another who is studying the intersection of climate change, food security and malnutrition in southwestern Uganda. In the field, I have continued training new research assistants (four new in the past year) to participate in our continued surveillance of natural resource extraction. This involved the training of a botany student in the collection and pressing of plant samples, and the training of other assistants in the use of sociological field methods to collect survey data. Most recently, I have trained a veterinarian and a masters student from the Department of Animal Biology to conduct research on the densities of wildlife species in the Makira Protected Area. This includes a mark-recapture study of tenrecs and a transect-based census of lemurs.
