Monitoring African Megafauna in an Anthropogenic Landscape: A 15-Year Case Study of the Vulnerable West African Giraffe

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F60460709%3A41340%2F25%3A103808" target="_blank" >RIV/60460709:41340/25:103808 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/acv.70039" target="_blank" >https://doi.org/10.1111/acv.70039</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/acv.70039" target="_blank" >10.1111/acv.70039</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Monitoring African Megafauna in an Anthropogenic Landscape: A 15-Year Case Study of the Vulnerable West African Giraffe

Original language description

Although the African continent remains rich in megafauna, around 50% are threatened with extinction by anthropogenic pressures, with West Africa showing the biggest decline. Many taxa like the West African giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis peralta), have suffered great range loss and population declines. Now restricted to Niger, the last West African giraffe almost exclusively lives in densely populated, agricultural area and shares its habitat with humans and their livestock. Using individual encounter history data from 15 years of annual photographic surveys (2005 – 2019), we calculated the population’s abundance, growth rate, survival, and encounter probabilities. First, we utilized pattern recognition software (HotSpotter) to clean the photographic database and correct individual encounter histories. We subsequently removed 145 double-counted ‘ghost’ individuals from 979 West African giraffe originally identified during the surveys through manual identification. Such errors and inadequate methodology caused a population overestimation of 18.9%, between 2011 and 2018. Updated encounter histories enabled us to accurately calculate abundance and demographic parameters with capture-mark-recapture (CMR) methods. By 2018, the population was estimated to have grown to 562 individuals at an average growth rate of 12%. Our results suggest that the data processing methods used in Niger have been increasingly inaccurate. We recommend changes to both monitoring and subsequent data processing to improve accuracy and effectiveness and increase the quality of conservation management decisions for the West African giraffe. Despite local threats, high survival rates and rapid population growth suggest that coexistence with humans can support the recovery of a depleted, slow-breeding megafauna species, even outside of protected areas.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10619 - Biodiversity conservation

Project

—

Continuities

S - Specificky vyzkum na vysokych skolach

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Animal Conservation

ISSN

1367-9430

e-ISSN

1367-9430

Volume of the periodical

2025

Issue of the periodical within the volume

neuvedeno

Country of publishing house

GB - UNITED KINGDOM

Number of pages

14

Pages from-to

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UT code for WoS article

001608325400001

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-105021248799