Thailand’s first marine National Park, Khao Sam Roi Yot also contains a large area of freshwater/brackish marshland (Thung Sam Roi Yot) which covers some 37% of the National Park. It was this area that I visited on my recent trip to Thailand. My colleagues from King Mongkut’s University of Technology, Thonburi (KMUTT) have a project in the area assessing the occupancy and density of Fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus) led by MSc student Kitipat Phosri (known as Tae) and his supervisor, Dr Dusit Ngoprasert.

Thung Sam Roi Yot wetlands

Fishing cat are thought to be Vulnerable to extinction (IUCN red list), given suspected decline in populations across their range countries in south and southeast Asia. Global Fishing cat strongholds are thought to be in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, West Bengal in India and the Terai-Duar belt of the Himalayan foothills in India and Nepal. There is a serve lack of recent records from most of southeast Asia. Threats include direct exploitation for consumption, retaliatory killing in response to livestock (chickens) or fish-stock (shrimp, crabs, fish) losses and habitat loss. Continuing conflict with people has meant that the global population has declined by an estimated 30% in the past 15 years. A previous study in Khao Sam Roi Yot, using radio-telemetry to locate and follow 16 individuals between 2011 and 2014 highlighted poaching and retribution killings to be the major causes of high cat mortality (84% mortality).

Camera trap images of Fishing-cat in the reserve

Camera trap image of a very wet Fishing cat

Fishing cat paw prints in mangrove areas inside the reserve

Tae has been surveying for the Fishing cat along transects both inside and outside of the reserve where much of the land is dedicated to aquaculture (shrimp farms). He has also set camera traps to allow him to identify individual Fishing cats. Preliminary results suggest that occupancy is higher than expected given the massive threats and high mortality recorded in the recent past. Interestingly, the shrimp ponds seem to also support Fishing cat, with signs of cats being very obvious in these human dominated areas. This leads to the intriguing question – are these disturbed habitats actually a suitable alternative habitat?

Tae identifying fishing cat prints near abandoned shrimp ponds outside of the reserve

Fishing cat latrine inside an abandoned shrimp pond building

Shrimp ponds – traditionally managed sites still retain high levels of Fishing cat occupancy

One potential threat on the horizon is industrial scale shrimp-ponds. Companies are buying-up abandoned traditional shrimp ponds and replacing them with large scale industrial operations. These include the remove of all vegetation around the ponds and reducing the time that shrimp ponds are left between restocking. This means there will be less opportunity for Fishing cat to feed on discarded shrimp or fish.

Industrial scale shrimp ponds constitute a new threat to Fishing cat

Tae will continue to work on the occupancy surveys and will also get an understanding of density in the area. One key aspect of his work is to investigate the human-wildlife conflict from the human point of view. He is currently conducting interviews with the local shrimp farmers to find out if they perceive the cat as a threat to their livestock and livelihood and how they address any conflicts.

Background
This post is inspired by a tweet I saw a few weeks ago where @TZbirder had queried why a publication on African Elephant poaching had no African authors. I wanted to know how common this was, so I decided to look at authorship of papers in a Journal that I know is focused exclusively on Africa (and is close to my heart as it was where I got my first paper published). I downloaded the bibliographic records of the last 2000 African Journal of Ecology papers from Scopus to look at the authorship in relation to the country listed in each authors affiliation. I assumed that the key authorship positions were “First” and “Last” author and focused on these two positions predominately. It is important to note I can only look at the institutional address of the authors so there will be (I have no doubt) some authors of African origin in European institutions and visa versa (as I myself have been on several occasions).

I  make use of the R packages bibliometrix, tidyverse, igraph, stringi and ggnetwork and I have made extensive use of https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/bibliometrix/vignettes/bibliometri x-vignette.html.

Trends in first and last authorship

The number of publications from an Africa-based first author compared to a non-Africa based first author appear similar – both are increasing steadily which can only be good news.  The trends in last authorship are similar to those in first authorship. A general increase in the number of publications regardless of Institutional country.

What happens when we exclude South Africa?

Again, the trends are similar but there are consistently more non-Africa based last authors than African-based ones – although the number and trend are similar, but with a more recent large difference becoming apparent.

What about the percentage of all authors who are from African Institutions?

Interestingly there seems to be a (very) slight decrease in the percentage contribution to publications in the African Journal of Ecology by Africa-based authors overall. However, most years have more than 50% of authors being based in Africa. The apparent decline perhaps reflects the widening of interest in the journal rather than a decrease in the opportunities for Africa-based authors.

Let’s look at country collaborations

The main countries collaborating with others are the USA and UK with South Africa, Uganda and Tanzania the main African countries.

What about changes over time?
I split the data in to two groups – pre 2006 and post 2006 to see if there has been any change in patterns of country collaboration

Pre 2006

Post 2006

Pre-2006 the UK and USA dominate the collaborations, post-2006 collaborations included more African countries with South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania being predominant. The UK and USA still dominate though. West Africa is under-represented, perhaps due to the history of the African Journal of Ecology, which has its foundations in East Africa. There is a greater diversity of Institutions involved in Research in to African ecology than there was in the past.

Conclusion

From this cursory look there is indications that for the African Journal of Ecology capacity building is a continued focus of the journal. We can only hope that in the near future more Africa-based researchers are leading the collaborations with other institutions across the world.

@JKRWard (https://twitter.com/JKRWard) made this brilliant graphical abstract for us

Our recent paper stemmed from a long collaboration with our colleagues at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in Thailand. We have become increasingly concerned by a lack of records of some species of Phasianidae outside of well protected reserves in Southeast Asia.

We do not have much evidence about how species respond to human-driven threats, such as direct hunting and habitat destruction. In order to understand where the group is most threatened we created an expert elicited Bayesian Belief Network to explore survival prospects in the face of this uncertainty. We used publicly available data on IUCN extinction probability categories, proxies of threat (effects of hunting, forest loss and protected area effectiveness) and species geographic ranges to assess where the overall risk to survival was highest.

Western Myanmar, Central Indoburma (Thailand/Myanmar), the Annamite mountains and Central Vietnam lowlands, Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo are priorities for avoiding large numbers of extinctions.  In order to reduce the level of uncertainty we need to focus research on understanding the intensity of hunting pressure across the region, and variation in species’ tolerance to human disturbance.