Given the biodiversity crisis (6emextinction), effective conservation strategies that offset threats to ecosystem integrity are essential to maintain biodiversity and the benefits that local communities can extract from it. The development of scenarios for the sustainable use of biodiversity is therefore a major challenge for the scientific community in developing countries. The key idea of the RADAR-BE research group is therefore to address the lack of scientific benchmarks for the exploitation of natural resources through three interdependent lines of research:
(i)- to improve our understanding of how the use of biological resources influences the sustainability of access to them and their impact on ecosystem services; (ii)- to improve our understanding of how the use of biological resources influences the sustainability of access to them and their impact on ecosystem services; .
<(ii) - develop, analyse and parameterise modelling tools that integrate both the needs of the population and the sustainable conservation of natural resources in order to predict the impacts of the bushmeat trade on biodiversity; (iii) - develop, analyse and parameterise modelling tools that integrate both the needs of the population and the sustainable conservation of natural resources in order to predict the impacts of the bushmeat trade on biodiversity
<(iii)- develop a set of quantitative scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services at different scales (national and sub-regional).
Our starting point was the observation that the Beninese government and natural resource managers do not have objective data at the national level on the sustainability of hunting practices and the risks of extinction to support their management decisions. Wildlife management and regulation of the bushmeat trade are not yet explicitly included in the management plans for Benin's classified forests. Through our research group we aim to collect sufficient data to generate information on the bushmeat sector in the form of technical sheets that can support policies and strategies to maintain the use and trade of bushmeat at sustainable levels. The specific objectives will be:
- i)- to trace the magnitude of the bushmeat trade networks in Southern Benin,
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- ii)- to provide indicators (diagnostic markers) of the population dynamics of the main species targeted by this trade and of the woody species making up the forest blocks,
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- iii)- to model the relationship between forest area, dispersant population sizes, dissemination efficiency and level of invasibility of forest patches by local communities, and
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- iv) to raise awareness of biodiversity conservation among the populations of villages on the outskirts of the study sites involved in the bushmeat trade.
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The training of student-researchers on the basis of North-South collaboration will allow us to better strengthen the capacities of our research team to better investigate the above-mentioned objectives.
