The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Justin S. Brashares to work with Dr. Andrew Balmford at Cambridge University's Conservation Biology Group (CBG) and with Mr. Moses Sam at the Ghana Wildlife Division.
Massive over-hunting of wildlife for meat throughout the developing world is causing local extinctions of hundreds of species of large mammals. Identifying the sustainability and long-term effects of this bushmeat harvest, and the role bushmeat plays in human food security are priorities for biodiversity conservation. This project will describe long-term trends in large mammal populations and investigate the influence of biogeographic, ecological and socio-economic factors on rates of population and community decline of wildlife in Ghana, West Africa. The work makes use of Ghana's 31 year wildlife monitoring program and will provide desperately needed information on rates of decline for 41 mammal species, links between wildlife declines and characteristics of reserves and human settlement, relationships between availability of alternate sources of protein for humans and large mammal declines, and top-down and bottom-up effects of local extinction of species. Results of the research will build realistic models of the effects of bushmeat hunting on wildlife populations and communities. These models will then be applied to devise and implement conservation and monitoring strategies in the many areas of Africa where the impact and scale of bushmeat harvests remain poorly documented.
