Wildlife responses to anthropogenic disturbance in Amazonian forests Mark I. Abrahams Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK September 2016 © This copy of the thesis has been supplied on the condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 2 Contents Acknowledgements 3 Abstract 5 Chapter 1: Introduction 6 External determinants of structural and non-structural forest 24 Chapter 2: disturbance along Amazonian cul-de-sac rivers Semi-subsistence Amazonians incur significant agricultural losses to 73 Chapter 3: forest vertebrate crop raiders Measuring local depletion of terrestrial game vertebrates by central- 114 Chapter 4: place hunters in rural Amazonia Trialling novel GPS units to characterise simulated hunts with 161 Chapter 5: domestic dogs in Brazilian Amazonia Chapter 6: Concluding Remarks 192 Photographs Title page A várzea community in the Juruá region Chapter 1 Light aircraft flight to Carauari Chapter 2 Estrada do Gavião, Carauari Chapter 3 A proud roçado-owner in the Juruá region Chapter 4 Game carcasses and skins in the Juruá and Uatumã regions. Top left - Crax alector, top right - Eunectes murinus, bottom left – Chelonoidis spp., bottom right - Pecari tajacu Chapter 5 Hunting dogs being fed Chapter 6 Sunset over the Juruá river 3 Acknowledgements This undertaking has been a challenge and a privilege, possible only due to the multifaceted support of many people. Firstly I thank my supervisor, Professor Carlos A. Peres, for initiating this project and for providing guidance and inspiration throughout. There are a host of people, communities and organisations from the Juruá and Uatumã regions, as well as from Manaus, to whom I am immeasurably grateful. I cannot begin to thank them enough and there are far too many for me to name them all. The incredible warmth and hospitality I was shown in Amazonas was humbling. The people and communities of the Juruá and Uatumã regions shared their food with me, gave me a place to sleep, looked after me when I was sick, looked after my equipment, helped transport me when the motor broke, worked hard with me in the forest, allowed me to work with them in their roçados, casas de farinha, and contagem, shared outrageous stories with me (Matado por um jabuti? Tu e doido rapas!), humoured my bizarre behaviour, tolerated my incessant questions, terrible Portuguese and stupid mistakes, explained things patiently to me and shared with me the beauty of their communities, the river and the forest. I don’t think I was as patient, understanding or generous with them. I was often frustrated, tired and stressed. I hope they know how much I appreciate all the time I spent with them. Every few weeks I still dream about the forest. It is in my blood and I think it will always bring me back. Many Brazilian organisations and companies provided support and datasets and enabled or permitted me to conduct fieldwork and I am immensely grateful to them. These include the Associação dos Moradores da Reserva de Desenvolvimento Sustentável Uacari (AMARU), Associação dos Produtores Rurais de Carauarí (ASPROC), Centro Estadual de Unidades de Conservação (CEUC), Fundação Amazonas Sustentável (FAS), PetroRio (formerly HRT), Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis (IBAMA), Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio), Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), Instituto de Conservação e Desenvolvimento Sustentável da Amazônia (IDESAM), Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA), Instituto de Proteção Ambiental do Amazonas (IPAAM), Projeto Médio Juruá (PMJ), Reserva de Desenvolvimento Sustentável do Uacari (RDS Uacari), Reserva de Desenvolvimento Sustentável do Uatumã (RDS Uatumã), Reserva Extrativista Médio Juruá (RESEX Médio Juruá), Secretaria de Estado de Meio Ambiente e Desenvolvimento Sustentável do Amazonas (SDS), Universidade do Estado de Mato Grosso (UNEMAT). My PhD studentship has been generously funded and supported by the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA). They provided additional unanticipated funding for conferences and fieldwork expenses for which I am especially grateful. My fieldwork was 4 also funded by The Explorer’s Club, Idea Wild and a Darwin Initiative for the Survival of Species grant (No. 20-001) awarded to CAP. I thank the Mataki, Technology for Nature collaboration, for providing me with Mataki GPS devices and equipment. I thank Lucas Joppa and Siamak Tavakoli of Microsoft Research for instigating the Mataki project. I thank my colleague and fellow researcher Hugo C.M. Costa, for carrying out fieldwork related to crop raiding. I also thank my colleagues at UEA, including the Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation (CEEC), for their valuable input. I would like to thank E.J. Millner Gulland and the Imperial College Conservation Science MSc, for giving me the opportunity to study Conservation Science. I hardly dreamed this was possible. Lastly I thank my family, friends, officemates and girlfriend, for their unwavering support and encouragement, and for enduring my unending expressions of frustration. My sanity is only intact because of you. 5 Abstract Legally inhabited indigenous, extractive and sustainable use tropical forest reserves, have been lauded as a solution to the intractable problem of how to assure the welfare and secure livelihoods of the world’s diverse forest-dependent people, whilst conserving the world’s most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems. This strategy has been critiqued by human rights advocates, who assert that legally inhabited reserves paternalistically restrict the livelihood choices and development aspirations of forest-dwellers, and by conservationists, who argue that sustained human presence and resource extraction erodes tropical forest biodiversity. This thesis examines both the anthropogenic impacts on tropical forests at the regional, landscape and household scales and the livelihood challenges faced by semi-subsistence local communities in the Brazilian Amazon. A spatially explicit dataset of 633,721 rural Amazonian households and an array of anthropogenic and environmental variables were used to examine the extent and distribution of structural (deforestation) and non-structural (hunting) human disturbance adjacent to 45 cul-de-sac rivers across the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Pará. At the landscape and household scales, a total of 383 camera trap deployments, 157 quantitative interviews and 164 GPS deployments were made in the agricultural mosaics and forest areas controlled by 63 semi-subsistence communities in the Médio Juruá and Uatumã regions of Central-Western Brazilian Amazonia, in order to quantify and explicate the (i) livelihood costs incurred through the raiding of staple crops by terrestrial forest vertebrates, (ii) degree of depletion that communities exert upon the assemblage of forest vertebrates and (iii) spatial behaviour of hunting dogs and their masters during simulated hunts. Our results indicate that at the regional scale, accessibility, fluvial or otherwise, modulated the drivers, spatial distribution and amount of anthropogenic forest disturbance. Rural household density was highest in the most accessible portions of rivers and adjacent to rivers close to large urban centres. Unlike the low unipolar disturbance evident adjacent to roadless rivers, road- intersected rivers exhibited higher disturbance at multiple loci. At the household and landscape scales semi-subsistence agriculturalists lost 5.5% of their staple crop annually to crop raiders and invested significant resources in lethal and non-lethal strategies to suppress crop raiders, and to avoid losses an order of magnitude higher. Crop raiding was heightened in sparsely settled areas, compounding the economic hardship faced by communities already disadvantaged by isolation from urban centres. A select few harvest-sensitive species were either repelled or depleted by human communities. Diurnal species were detected relatively less frequently in disturbed areas close to communities, but individual species did not shift their activity patterns. Aggregate species biomass was depressed near urban areas rather than communities. Depletion was predicated upon species traits, with large-bodied large-group-living species the worst impacted. Hunting dogs travelled only ~ 13% farther than their masters. Urban hunters travel significantly farther than rural hunters. Hunting dogs were recognised to have deleterious impacts on wildlife, but were commonly used to defend against crop raiders. 6 Chapter 1: Introduction 7 1.1 Tropical forests; importance and threats Tropical forests have stood for some 60 million years, and harbour the majority of the Earth’s ~6.5 million terrestrial species (Burnham and Johnson, 2004, Mora et al., 2011). Yet since the mid-1900s, roughly half of all tropical forests globally have been felled by a single species (Fagan et al., 2006). Anthropogenic threats are simultaneously eroding tropical biodiversity and the natural capital on which humanity depends. Apart from the immeasurable existence value of tropical forests, they also provide a wealth of poorly quantified ecosystem services, maintaining a biosphere amenable to