We modeled the influence of different rates of harvest and proportions of landscape dedicated to un-hunted reserves on population persistence, population size, social dynamics, and hunting yields of red howler monkeys.
Their ecological and behavioral traits make them difficult to manage in captivity for meat production, but maintenance of intact forest habitat might result in locally sustainable hunting yields.
Additionally, hunting yields, expressed as the number of individuals hunted/year/km2, increased in proximity to un-hunted areas, and suggested that dispersal from un-hunted areas may have contributed to hunting sustainability.
Finally, our results indicated that when more than 55% of the landscape was harvested at high (30%) rates, hunting yields, as measured by kilograms of biomass, were less than those obtained from moderate harvest rates.
Hunting yields provide a coarse but feasible proxy of species abundance at broad spatial scales when absolute abundance values are lacking [ 28].
These results indicate that un-hunted areas serve to enhance hunting yields, population size, and population persistence in hunted landscapes.
Populations in North America and in western Europe are often carefully managed through habitat manipulation, supplemental feeding, and artificial rearing to ensure maximum hunting yields.
The relative abundances of wild boar and red deer at municipality level were calculated based on hunting yields (animals shot per municipality and hunting season).
Other studies pointing to a decline in food sharing networks cite reasons including the high cost of hunting; an increasing number of households without a hunter; and stress on hunting yields due to environmental changes [ 14, 19, 62, 66].
So it is hardly surprising that European investors are hunting for yield in the corporate sector.
