Community Camera Trapping – Dr Amy Dickman’s Ruaha Carnivore Project

The Ruaha Carnivore Project founded by Senior Research Fellow Dr Amy Dickman, has recently expanded its successful programme. The programme combines ecological and wildlife monitoring with community involvement and development. Dr Dickman founded the Ruaha Carnivore Project after discovering the troublingly high number of large carnivore killings in small African villages. Locals enforce killings of large carnivores on their land in order to prevent loss of livestock.

The Ruaha team introduced the Community Camera Trapping programme, a system which allows local villages to exchange their camera shots of animals and carnivores in return for ‘points’ that add up and are used to fund benefits that enrich community development.The recent presence of two lionesses on the Idodi village land awarded the Tanzanian village 30,000 points, a significant amount that funnels directly into benefits for community development. Dr Dickman and her team regularly sit with the village chief to discuss strategies for the community. These benefits are then categorised and distributed, most often as health care and veterinary health care, education and building materials.

Dr Dickman and her research team have seen a palpable change in the local communities’ behaviour and attitude towards large carnivores, through the implementation of the points scoring system. The programme has also provided a chance to monitor the surrounding wildlife, and raise conservation awareness throughout small Tanzanian communities impacted by large carnivores.  Dr Dickman notes:

At RCP we believe that communities have a big role to play in wildlife conservation. It is they who, day after day, coexist with these animals, often with negative consequences.

Dr Amy Dickman is the Kaplan Senior Research Fellow in Felid Conservation at Oxford University, and has 20 years’ experience working with large carnivores in Africa, specialising in human-carnivore conflict.