Determining the effectiveness and usefulness of three community-led carnivore survey types to wildlife management in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, Namibia

Abstract

Community Based Natural Resource Management in Namibia is known as an exemplary conservation programme giving local communities rights over the use of wildlife resources. Monitoring of wildlife population numbers and trends is essential in conservancies to manage wildlife for sustainable benefits and reduced human-wildlife conflict. Nyae Nyae Conservancy conducts systematic wildlife monitoring, inclusive of carnivores. Monitoring carnivore presence and distribution is important because they are often the leading cause of livestock depredation in the area. Incidences of livestock depredation by carnivores are recorded in the conservancy, helping inform decision-making regarding the need to reduce or relocate problem-causing carnivores. To complement these incidence records, annual foot transect counts and spoor surveys of carnivores were introduced in 2017. This study compared the relative species richness, number of observations and their distribution detected by regular counts, spoor surveys, and human-wildlife conflict incidence reports for ten carnivore species in Nyae Nyae Conservancy. Between 2017 and 2022, there were an average of 17 physical sightings, 25 human-wildlife conflict incidents, and 208 spoor recordings of the ten target carnivore species per year. The highest annual species richness for physical surveys was five, while spoor of all ten species were only identified in 2019. In 2021 and 2022, a total of five carnivore species were involved in human-wildlife conflict incidents, the highest recorded during the study period. Over the six-year period, the relative abun- dance of species to each other correlated significantly between spoor surveys and human-wildlife conflict incidence frequency, while there was no relationship between spoor surveys and transect visual sightings, or between sightings and human-wildlife conflict incidence. The study indicates that spoor counts are effective in detecting the presence of carnivore species, but do not necessarily provide an accurate indication of the overall abundance and proportional abundance of carnivores.