Savannas

Virtually all hunters and gatherers in Africa today not only depend on foraging for their livelihoods but they also engage in food production and trade of domestic crops, livestock, and other resources. Many of them also take part in various kinds of work for other people in exchange for cash, food, and other goods.  Drawing on case studies from western, central, eastern, and southern Africa, this paper assesses the causes and consequences of the shifts from hunting and gathering to agriculture, pastoralism, and small-scale business activities. Today, there are few ‘isolated hunter-gatherers’ who depend completely on foraging and are not enmeshed in the global, national, and local socioeconomic systems. Climate change, globalization, and the expansion of markets are leading to significant changes in local subsistence and livelihood strategies. These and other factors are also contributing to an expansion of innovative efforts to cope with the many serious challenges facing Africa’s indigenous peoples.

Neotropical savannas have undergone continuous processes of landscape transformation (e.g., agriculture, oil, gas, and hydrocarbon industry) and very little is known about the ecology and natural history of key biological groups such as terrestrial mammals while the information on behavioral aspects of mammalian species in these ecosystems is very scarce. Here, we aimed to describe the activity patterns of medium and large mammals in two savanna ecosystems in the Colombian Llanos. A set of 60 camera traps was installed in the two ecosystems for 35 days (2100 camera days). We described the activity patterns of nine predominantly nocturnal species. We found no difference in circadian distributions of mammals between ecosystems. Cuniculus paca Linnaeus 1758 and Dasyprocta fuliginosa Wagler 1832 showed patterns of exclusion probably due to competition whereas other species like Tamandua tetradactyla Linnaeus1758 and Myrmecophaga tridactyla Linnaeus 1758 displayed similar activity patterns. We highlight the importance of savannas for the conservation of these species and discuss the relevance of studies on activity patterns for mammal ecology and conservation in Neotropical savannas.