Prospects for freshwater turtle population recovery are catalysed by pan-Amazonian community-based management
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Conservation Biology, Coupled Natural and Human Systems, Natural Resource Management, Environmental Impacts, Spatial and Geographic Information Science
- Keywords
- Adaptive management, Community based management, Lefkovitch matrix, Life history, Natural resource management, Protected area effectiveness, Podocnemis unifilis, Population recovery, Reptile, Turtle
- Copyright
- © 2018 Norris et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Prospects for freshwater turtle population recovery are catalysed by pan-Amazonian community-based management. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27044v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27044v1
Abstract
Sustainable use as a mechanism for the conservation and recovery of exploited wildlife populations remains intensely debated, including for freshwater turtles, a diverse and imperilled group of aquatic reptiles that are an important food source for many residents of tropical regions. Here we evaluated the geographical extent of recovery options for a heavily exploited tropical freshwater turtle fauna across 8.86 M km2 of South American river catchments under Business-as-Usual (BAU), Protection (Pr) and Community-Based-Management (CBM) scenarios. For the widespread indicator species, Podocnemis unifilis, demographic analysis showed that populations subject moderate levels of female harvest (≤10%) can recover over broad areas if concurrent headstarting of hatchlings is practiced more widely. With regional strengthening of the protected area network unlikely, CBM developed with harvest frameworks derived from demographic rates appropriate to tropical species could catalyse a rapid continental scale recovery of Amazonian freshwater turtles within a few decades.
Author Comment
This is the first version of a manuscript submitted to Conservation Letters.
Supplemental Information
Supplemental Material
Presenting methodological details for demographic projections and spatial analysis.