Study Area: Ivindo National Park

Ivindo National Park, located in Gabon, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its rich biodiversity. However, it faces threats from poaching, deforestation, and habitat degradation. The loss of key species—especially large terrestrial vertebrates—due to human activity contributes to ecological imbalances. These pressures threaten the park’s ability to support a full range of species, from forest elephants to smaller mammals and birds.

Project: Assessing Defaunation with Innovative Technologies

Building on the foundational work of Dr. John Poulsen, now at the Nature Conservancy, we aim to assess defaunation in Ivindo National Park. By combining cutting-edge technologies such as camera traps, acoustic recorders, and terrestrial LiDAR, we gather data on species occupancy and abundance with high accuracy. These tools provide non-invasive, long-term monitoring of wildlife, enabling us to identify patterns of decline. Our project contributes to understanding how defaunation impacts biodiversity and helps guide conservation efforts. More information on this work is available here: Bass Connections.

Graduate students from the Cagle Lab have taken on various projects, including seed predation studies, acoustic surveys of putty-nosed monkeys, density modeling of duiker species, and species-habitat relationship analyses. This work integrates the use of camera traps, acoustic monitoring, and density models to track wildlife presence and abundance. By employing these innovative tools, we aim to understand how wildlife populations respond to growing threats and provide data-driven insights to inform conservation strategies in the park. This multifaceted approach ensures that our efforts not only monitor current biodiversity but also provide a baseline for future ecological studies.