Acoustic monitoring of human exploitation in tropical forests

Tropical forests contain over half of global terrestrial biodiversity, and they provide vital ecosystem services at local, regional and global scales. Forest disturbance and removal by peopleclearance has have large impacts on biodiversity and cascading effects on ecosystem functioning and services. Whilst land conversion is detectable from satellite imagery, cryptic activities such as hunting and resource extraction go vastly under-reported. Hunting is a major driver of defaunation, which intensifies with increased access routes for land conversion [1]. Defaunation has far-reaching social, economic and ecological implications for rural communities, where wild meat contributes to food security and livelihoods [2].
The student will take an interdisciplinary approach to evaluating the socio-environmental sustainability of hunting practices within tropical forests in Belize, Central America. The region has seen rapid deforestation over the past decade, with increased isolation of forest areas. The student will develop deployment strategies for acoustic sensors [3] to collect data on hunting pressures across a range of forest environments. These data will be amongst the first from anywhere in the world on rates of exploitation by hunting in tropical forests. They will ground-truth an integrated socio-ecological examination of how land-use change is influencing hunting activities and consequential environmental impacts.