Zooming in on human-wildlife coexistence: primate community responses in a shared agroforest landscape in Guinea-Bissau

In this thesis I explore how humans and nonhuman primates, including chimpanzees, share the space in a coastal forest-agriculture-village landscape mosaic at Cantanhez National Park (NP), southern Guinea-Bissau (West Africa). I integrate data from arboreal and terrestrial camera traps with habitat surveys, remote sensing and interviews with local people. For the first part of this thesis I use arboreal and terrestrial camera trap occupancy modelling across the landscape to investigate patterns of occurrence of seven primate species. Based on the landscape of fear concept, in Part 2 I combine camera trap based-Bayesian spatiotemporal models with interview data to investigate chimpanzee-human interactions at one focal site within the park (Caiquene–Cadique). Some primates showed high sensitivity to anthropogenic influences particularly king colobus (Colobus polykomos) and Guinea baboon (Papio papio). King colobus was the rarest primate and showed a strong avoidance of villages. Baboons largely relied on forest, and in the rainy season their distribution was severely constrained to areas away from human land uses. The highly restricted spatial occurrence of king colobus and baboons is likely the result of intensive hunting pressures particularly in the recent past. In constrast, at the landscape scale chimpanzees showed a tendency to occur nearer villages in both dry and rainy seasons, suggesting that chimpanzees are able to find opportunities for feeding and nesting in areas highly frequented by people. When looking at the fine scale, chimpanzees in Caiquene–Cadique visited the villages but intensified the use of areas further away from them, showing some levels of risk avoidance. Chimpanzees also displayed a tendency to minimise the use of cultivated areas but used areas near roads more frequently. Chimpanzee home range use was also positively influenced by the spatiotemporal availability of ripe oil palm fruit, thus taking advantage of a dominant resource across both forest and the heterogeneous matrix. During the period of wild food scarcity, chimpanzees increased visits within the villages when orange, lime and papaya were available. Thus, when forest foods were scarce, risk avoidance was temporally overruled in favour of optimal foraging. Interview data with local people corroborated biological data and provided additional information on chimpanzee behaviour within villages. Based on local narratives, when foraging at the villages chimpanzees used different social groupings depending on the targeted resource, and behaved more boldly towards women and children during close interactions. My data emphasise the importance of using different spatial scale approaches and further highlight chimpanzee resilience and flexibility in human-dominated landscapes where people remain willing to share the space with them