title: Fishing and hunting in the Amazon floodplain
title: linkages among biodiversity conservation, rural livelihoods and food security
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Tregidgo, Daniel
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2017
Subjects: fishing
food security
hunting
interdisciplinarity
livelihoods

description: Billions of people rely on wild meat (wild fish and bushmeat) for their
      livelihood and food security, but unsustainable harvesting is causing
      pan-tropic defaunation. In addition to the decline of prey populations,
      many harvest-dependent societies in these regions are witnessing major
      social and environmental changes, including; rapid urbanisation,
      population growth, (unequal) socio-economic development, nutritional
      transitions, policy alterations, habitat conversion and climatic change.
      Despite the potential importance of these changes for biodiversity and
      human well-being, our understanding of how these changes are impacting the
      dynamics of harvesting systems is poor. In this thesis I engage with four
      major knowledge gaps, in particular. The first is that we know almost
      nothing about the relative influence of emergent large rainforest cities
      on wildlife. Second, the suggested connections between defaunation and
      food insecurity have weak empirical foundations. Third, links between
      aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems are largely neglected. And fourth,
      despite recent recognition of their importance, social-ecological
      feedbacks in tropical harvesting systems remain woefully understudied. 
      
      
      Hence, my overall aim in this thesis was to address these and related
      knowledge gaps by investigating the drivers and dynamics of contemporary
      wildlife harvesting in the Amazon, and assess the outcomes for
      biodiversity and rural food security. I focus on rural Amazonians, amongst
      who high levels of social marginalization, multi-dimensional poverty and
      food insecurity have been identified. These people are juxtaposed between
      traditional lives where seasons dictate subsistence wildlife harvesting,
      and a modern Amazonia in which rural livelihoods are increasingly
      influenced by the demands of growing urban areas, home to three out of
      four Amazonians. This PhD study was designed to capture the influences of
      the seasonal flood pulse and urban markets (metropolitan and provincial)
      in an extensive and largely-forested area of the Amazon floodplain. This
      was achieved by interviewing households in 22 communities during both the
      high and low water season along a 1,267 km stretch of the River Purus, the
      most important river for commercial fishing for Manaus, Amazonia’s largest
      city of over 2 million people. Food insecurity was assessed during 556
      household visits, in which time nearly 600 different harvesters were
      interviewed about their hunting and fishing activities, including detailed
      catch and effort data concerning 886 fishing trips.
      
      
      I show that Manaus’ favourite fish species (tambaqui, Colossoma
      macropomum) halves in body size and catch rate (catch-per-unit-effort in
      biomass; CPUEb) within several hundreds of kilometres of the city, with
      defaunation detectable 1000 km into the rainforest wilderness (Chapter 2).
      Despite defaunation of the main target species, rural fishers near to
      Manaus managed to maintain overall fish CPUEb, and levels of food
      insecurity were no worse than upstream (Chapter 3). Instead, I reveal
      severe seasonal food insecurity among the rural population associated with
      falls in aggregated fishing CPUEb of 73% during high waters. I provide
      novel evidence that food insecurity can result from significant falls in
      wildlife CPUEb (Chapter 3), and that this seasonal food insecurity may
      drive increased bushmeat offtake (Chapter 4). I also show in Chapter 4 how
      seasonal water-level and market forces can dictate wildlife harvesting
      profiles (akin to species assemblages). I provide evidence that the
      mechanism driving the defaunation seen in Chapter 1 and the differing
      harvest profiles in Chapter 4 is the regular service of city-based boats
      that purchase fish and deposit ice only in communities nearer to Manaus.
      Chapter 5 was inspired by listening to local voices, specifically,
      concerns that making a living is being increasing constrained by a
      combination of defaunation and environmental legislation. I explored these
      viewpoints using a social-ecological vulnerability framework, allowing me
      to better understand and voice their concerns, while contributing to the
      poorly studied concept of social-ecological feedbacks. 
      
      
      Through these findings, I establish and advance key links between drivers
      and dynamics of contemporary wildlife harvesting in the Amazon, and the
      outcomes for biodiversity and rural food security. As such, I emphasise
      the importance of taking a holistic view of the research and management of
      harvesting systems to help achieve sustainable food systems in the Amazon,
      and across the planet.