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Description
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs have been implemented worldwide to help achieve conservation goals, especially in rural or developing regions while benefiting (or at least not sacrificing) local people’s wellbeing. Generally, PES programs pay landowners to change land use behaviors in order to maintain and improve targeted ecosystem services. The impacts of such behavioral changes have not been significantly studied in the context of wildlife’s reaction to such changes, especially those in response to PES programs. This thesis looks to a nature reserve in China to determine if an active PES program has exerted significant impacts on local wildlife species richness over time. Building on a previous study, data collected from camera traps throughout the Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve (FNNR) in Guizhou, China were used to inform a multi-species hierarchical occupancy model to provide estimates of species-specific and group-specific detection probabilities, probabilities of occupancy, and species richness at each survey site. Specifically, this study looks at two time periods to assess changes in wildlife occupancy over time. Leveraging a multiple imputation approach to estimate missing data, hypothesis testing was performed on a more robust basis. This thesis seeks to determine whether and how species occupancy and richness within the reserve have changed over time with environmental characteristics controlled. Using boosted regression trees, the relationships between the response and predictor variables are also compared over time. The results indicate that species richness significantly decreased over time, yet species richness remained higher in natural sites compared to PES sites. Influence of anthropogenic characteristics on wildlife occupancy and detection, such as human and domestic dog presence, livestock presence, and distance to human disturbance, also dramatically changed over time. Though the lack of pre and post-GTGP implementation comparisons makes projecting the effect of GTGP on local biodiversity difficult, continued estimation of species richness and GTGP’s ability to provide suitable habitat for a diverse range of species is recommended.
