Bushmeat Database

The searchable Bushmeat Database contains more than 700 citations, including peer-reviewed journal articles, books and book chapters, technical papers, reports and conference proceedings. Citations include direct DOI-based links to the articles on the original journal or publisher’s website. To see the data displayed in a visual format, visit the Bushmeat Data Map.


Title/Keywords
Author
Year

Bringing home the biggest bacon: a cross-site analysis of the structure of hunter-kill profiles in Neotropical forests
Author
Jerozolimski, A; Peres, CA
Year
2003
Secondary Title
Biological Conservation
Volume
111
Pages
415-425
Abstract
Forest vertebrates are critical to the subsistence of many tropical forest dwellers enjoying little or no access to other sources of animal protein. Yet the ecological and socioeconomic value of forest wildlife is being undermined as many large vertebrate populations are driven to local extinction by unsustainable hunting practices. Although large mammals that are preferred by hunters are widely variable in their morphology and ecology, they share a set of life history traits, which make them particularly vulnerable to overhunting. In this paper we compile data on game harvest from 31 tribal and nontribal settlements in Neotropical forests to examine how mammal assemblages are affected by the history of hunting within settlement catchment areas. The structure of hunter-kill profiles is related to settlement age and size in an attempt to understand how changes in hunting pressure may affect prey selectivity and the structure of residual game assemblages. There was a predictable shift from a few large-bodied to several small-bodied species harvested by increasingly older villages. Settlement persistence thus explained a significant proportion of the variation in mean body mass and species richness of mammals harvested. We conclude that differences in prey species profiles obtained by subsistence hunters of different ethnic groups can be largely explained by the local depletion status of game stocks, particularly large mammals, rather than by cultural factors. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. ????.????.????.
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