Data from: No safe refuge? Contrasting effects of hunting on rainforest mammal persistence and (re)colonisation

Defaunation in tropical forests represents one of the most urgent
biodiversity crises of our time, driven largely by unsustainable hunting.
Understanding how species persist or disappear under intense hunting
pressure is critical for designing effective conservation strategies,
especially in unprotected areas. We quantified how hunting influences
species dynamics in an unprotected Afrotropical rainforest by analysing
monitoring data collected from 2016 to 2023 for eleven terrestrial and
arboreal mammal species in the Ebo forest, Cameroon. Using Bayesian
dynamic occupancy models with correlated detections, we assessed how
species occupancy changes along environmental and anthropogenic gradients,
explicitly including hunting occurrence and hunters’ travel cost as
predictors for persistence and colonisation. Elevation emerged as the
strongest predictor positively influencing the occupancy of all eleven
species, with some species exhibiting non-linear trends along the
elevation gradient. Most species generally occupied areas with high travel
cost, especially elephant, chimpanzee, crowned monkey and red river hog.
Meanwhile, terrain ruggedness had variable effects, with a strong positive
effect on chimpanzee and a negative effect on mona monkey. Surprisingly,
hunting showed a positive though weak association with the persistence
probability of some species, suggesting that the areas used as refuges by
wildlife were not exempt from hunting. Species persistence was generally
unaffected by travel cost, except for chimpanzees. In parallel,
colonisation probability was lower in areas with past hunting history,
indicating that previously hunted areas were less likely to be recolonised
by wildlife. Similarly, colonisation tended to be higher in areas with
high travel cost, suggesting that more accessible areas were less likely
for recolonisation. These results imply that hunting not only targets
areas used as refuges by wildlife, but also reduces recolonisation
potential, and may therefore alter source-sink dynamics. We recommend
spatially targeted community-led actions to limit hunting where wildlife
still persists through the creation of no-hunting areas to ensure the
long-term persistence of wildlife within the forest.