Poaching in non–volant mammals in the Neotropical region: the importance of a metric to assess its impacts

Abstract

Much of the information on the hunting of mammals in natural environments is not performed in a standard way and is usually dispersed by different areas or regions that have different environmental structures. This limitation prevents the detection of trends and patterns such as which biomes are under more pressure and what are the rates and level of impact. We aimed to review the scientific literature on poaching of non–volant mammals to evaluate the impact at different study sites in the Neotropical region. We found that in more than half of these studies (66/112, 59 %), the main objectives were related to characterizing hunting activity while the potential impact of the hunting was not assessed. Evaluating the poaching through a metric assessment using qualitative and quantitative variables was the main objective in only 58 articles. We classified the hunting events as subsistence in most cases (46/58, 79 %), as illegal in a few case (12/58, 21 %) and as legal in one study only (1/58, 2 %). Based on this extensive review of scientific literature, we propose a metric assessment that can be performed in natural reserves and can lead to extensive monitoring on mammal populations through training on how to gauge this geo–referenced data.