Community-based conservation and chimpanzee research in Gishwati forest, Rwanda

As great ape populations around the world continue to decline, largely due to anthropogenic activities, conservation programs aimed at supporting these efforts have had mixed success. Here, we evaluate our community-based conservation program in Gishwati forest, Rwanda, aimed at helping to restore biodiversity and ecosystem services using chimpanzees as a flagship species. We examine the effectiveness of this program on reducing one of the ongoing threats to Gishwati's population of chimpanzees, illegal cattle grazing as well as the program's influence on the size of the chimpanzee population. We monitored illegal cattle grazing during several study periods between 2009 and 2019 in Gishwati forest following the implementation of our conservation program in 2008 that included law enforcement, community engagement, and research components. We found that when our conservation program was active, illegal cattle grazing was reduced to low levels. We also observed an increase in the chimpanzee population size during the 11 years since we started our conservation program. We examine how this reduction in cattle grazing and increase in chimpanzee population size may have been influenced by our community-centered approach and discuss the future of our conservation work in Gishwati.