Measuring the ecological success of the Communal Areas Management Programme For Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) in north-western Zimbabwe.

The Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) is a flagship Community Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM) developed in Zimbabwe. CBNRMs are growing in the unprotected lands surrounding many of the Africa’s protected areas. The influence of these initiatives on ecological processes is poorly understood. The goal of the study was to draw on ecological theory to provide a synthetic framework for understanding how CBNRMs around protected areas may alter ecological processes and biodiversity to provide a basis for identifying scientifically based management alternatives. We hypothesized that hunting produces a mosaic of sources and sinks that allows elephant and kudu to persist outside protected areas. Specifically the source sink model was tested empirically to determine how population dynamics in sinks differ significantly. Data for hunted ungulates species - Loxodonta africana africana (African elephant) and Tragelaphus strepsiceros (Greater kudu). The data recorded during road strip counts includes the species, number of individuals, age and sex composition, GPS location and distance category from park boundary. The study compared group size and age structure dynamics of elephants and kudus between two spatially heterogeneous sinks (a CAMPFIRE area not under protection versus protected safari hunting area).