Walton Ben J, Findlay Leah J, Hill Russell A
Department of Anthropology University of Durham Durham UK.
Primate & Predator Project Lajuma Research Centre Louis Trichardt South Africa.
Ecol Evol. 2022 Apr 13;12(4):e8808. doi: 10.1002/ece3.8808. eCollection 2022 Apr.
Foraging by wildlife on anthropogenic foods can have negative impacts on both humans and wildlife. Addressing this issue requires reliable data on the patterns of anthropogenic foraging by wild animals, but while direct observation by researchers can be highly accurate, this method is also costly and labor-intensive, making it impractical in the long-term or over large spatial areas. Camera traps and observations by guards employed to deter animals from fields could be efficient alternative methods of data collection for understanding patterns of foraging by wildlife in crop fields. Here, we investigated how data on crop-foraging by chacma baboons and vervet monkeys collected by camera traps and crop guards predicted data collected by researchers, on a commercial farm in South Africa. We found that data from camera traps and field guard observations predicted crop loss and the frequency of crop-foraging events from researcher observations for crop-foraging by baboons and to a lesser extent for vervets. The effectiveness of cameras at capturing crop-foraging events was dependent on their position on the field edge. We believe that these alternatives to direct observation by researchers represent an efficient and low-cost method for long-term and large-scale monitoring of foraging by wildlife on crops.
野生动物食用人为食物会对人类和野生动物都产生负面影响。解决这一问题需要有关野生动物人为觅食模式的可靠数据,虽然研究人员的直接观察可能非常准确,但这种方法成本高且劳动强度大,从长期或大面积来看并不实际。相机陷阱以及雇佣驱赶动物远离田地的守卫进行观察,可能是了解野生动物在农田觅食模式的有效替代数据收集方法。在此,我们在南非的一个商业农场调查了通过相机陷阱和作物守卫收集的南非大狒狒和绿猴作物觅食数据如何预测研究人员收集的数据。我们发现,相机陷阱和实地守卫观察的数据预测了狒狒作物觅食的作物损失和研究人员观察到的作物觅食事件频率,对绿猴的预测程度较低。相机捕捉作物觅食事件的有效性取决于它们在田边的位置。我们认为,这些替代研究人员直接观察的方法是对野生动物在作物上觅食进行长期和大规模监测的一种高效且低成本的方法。