In Southeast Asia, Illegal Hunting Is a More Immediate Threat to Wildlife Than Forest Degradation

A new study carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in cooperation with the World Wide Fund for Nature Vietnam (WWF-Vietnam) and the Sabah Forestry Department of the Government of Malaysia suggests that for ground dwelling mammal and bird communities, illegal hunting using indiscriminate snares may be a more immediate threat than forest degradation through selective logging. The researchers conducted a large scale camera-trapping study to compare several forest areas with logging concessions in Malaysian Borneo and protected areas in the Annamites ecoregion of Vietnam and Laos known to be subjected to illegal hunting. The results, published in the journal “Communications Biology”, show severe defaunation in snared forests compared to logged forests.

While both habitat degradation and unsustainable hunting have long been known to negatively affect animal communities in tropical rainforests, no study had directly compared how these threats compare in their severity in terms of losses of mammal and bird biodiversity at landscape scales. The result was that both logging and hunting negatively affected ground-dwelling mammal and bird communities, and unsustainable hunting had more severe effects on these communities. Overhunted sites in the Annamite Mountains of Vietnam and Laos had a higher proportion of species extirpated than the degraded sites in Borneo. Even species which persisted in the landscape subjected to illegal hunting had smaller distributions than similar species in the logging concessions.

Read more at Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V.

Photo: Forest degradation through selective logging.  CREDIT: Andrew Tilker