Efforts to protect threatened and endangered species in central Africa might be more successful if they focused on a smaller geographic area, new research suggests.
The study, which examined multi-species population counts in the seven main savanna national parks of central Africa, found that broader conservation efforts often led to decreased populations, likely because the lands were too large to manage effectively with the financial resources available.
“In a lot of Africa, there has been a lot of space set aside for wildlife,” said Mark Moritz, co-author on the study and an anthropology professor at The Ohio State University. “And what we’ve found is setting aside so much land is not sufficient in and of itself, and a lot of these protected areas are protected on paper only.”
The researchers’ analysis found that to effectively protect animals in those areas, significantly more funding would also be needed.
Read more at: Ohio State University
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