School of Natural Sciences and Psychology, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, L3 3AF, UK; Botswana Predator Conservation Trust, Maun, Botswana.
Botswana Predator Conservation Trust, Maun, Botswana.
Curr Biol. 2019 Jul 22;29(14):R681-R682. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.05.056.
Protected areas are critical to conservation efforts in the face of rapid biodiversity declines [1]. Yet the resources for conservation are often limited and shared amongst many competing priorities [2]. As a consequence, even basic monitoring surveys are absent within most protected areas [3]. Although a range of wildlife monitoring methods exist, considerable focused survey effort is often required to yield accurate and precise estimates [4]. This makes monitoring difficult to sustain or replicate, limiting access to the data required for evidence-based conservation decisions. Citizen-scientists have been proposed as an important complement to the finite resources available for basic monitoring within protected areas [5]; however, the full potential of this approach has yet to be realised. Wildlife tourists and guides are especially focussed on encountering and photographing fauna and flora, yet the data collected in these efforts is rarely harnessed for conservation monitoring within protected areas. A detailed understanding of photographic tourism's potential role in wildlife monitoring has been lacking, but is essential for the development of new tools to harness the data being collected through tourism. Here, we demonstrate that tourist-contributed data can aid wildlife monitoring in protected areas by providing population estimates of large carnivores comparable to those from traditional survey methods. Our approach could capitalize upon the immense number of wildlife photographs being taken daily as part of the global > 30-billion USD, wildlife-based tourism industry.
在面对生物多样性迅速减少的情况下，保护区对保护工作至关重要[1]。然而，保护资源往往有限，且需要满足许多相互竞争的优先事项[2]。因此，即使在大多数保护区内，基本监测调查也不存在[3]。尽管存在多种野生动物监测方法，但为了获得准确和精确的估计，往往需要大量集中的调查工作[4]。这使得监测难以持续或复制，限制了获得基于证据的保护决策所需的数据的访问。公民科学家已被提议作为保护区基本监测中有限资源的重要补充[5]；然而，这种方法的全部潜力尚未得到实现。野生动物游客和导游特别关注遇到和拍摄动植物，但在这些努力中收集的数据很少被用于保护区的保护监测。对摄影旅游在野生动物监测中的潜在作用的详细了解一直缺乏，但对于开发利用通过旅游收集的数据的新工具至关重要。在这里，我们证明了游客提供的数据可以通过提供与传统调查方法相当的大型食肉动物的种群估计来帮助保护区的野生动物监测。我们的方法可以利用每天作为全球价值超过 3000 亿美元的以野生动物为基础的旅游业的一部分而拍摄的大量野生动物照片来实现这一目标。
