Genesis of the team

Hunting for bushmeat consumption is of concern to conservationists in Benin. Research and development initiatives to address the problems posed by the game trade have been announced by various wildlife researchers and members of the Applied Ecology Laboratory of the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences at the University of Abomey-Calavi. Despite the particular attention paid to the bushmeat issue, the information available on hunting and trade is still fragmentary. Since 2007 there has been collaboration between the Laboratoire d'Ecologie Appliquée (represented by Dr DJAGOUN) and the IRD (represented by Dr GAUBERT, Laboratoire Evolution et Diversité Biologique, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse) on monitoring bushmeat markets in southern Benin with an active scientific publication addressing issues of small carnivore diversity and hunting pressures on mammalian fauna in southern Benin (Djagoun & Gaubert 2007). The overall observation in Benin is that most field studies are generally site-specific, without contextualising monitoring or coordination, and many studies are in the form of unpublished reports, sometimes difficult to access. Given the need to broaden the issue beyond socio-economic and cultural aspects to include ecological and genetic aspects in understanding the impacts of the bushmeat trade, we proposed to create a multidisciplinary research group in Benin to analyse this sector of activity with regard to its sustainability in terms of wildlife and forest conservation in Dahomey Gap, an integral part of the Guinean Forests hotspot. Our team is composed of six national researchers and one French researcher, with diversified and complementary competences with regard to the objectives set within the framework of the JEAI. These include specialists in animal ecology, socio-economics, plant-animal relations, ethnobiology, agroforestry, genetics, conservation biology, plant ecology and habitat conservation, trained in monitoring the bushmeat trade and studying forest plots. This project developed by the RADAR-BE group also responds to numerous requests from international forums and conventions such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES), the national strategy and national action plan on biodiversity in Benin, in that it will provide indicators of the anthropic pressure exerted on biodiversity that are useful for decision-making in protected area management policies.