The contribution of community-based conservation models to conserving large herbivore populations.

In East Africa, community-based conservation models (CBCMs) have been established to support the conservation of wildlife in fragmented landscapes like the Tarangire Ecosystem, Tanzania. To assess how different management approaches maintained large herbivore populations, we conducted line distance surveys and estimated seasonal densities of elephant, giraffe, zebra, and wildebeest in six management units, including three CBCMs, two national parks (positive controls), and one area with little conservation interventions (negative control). Using a Monte-Carlo approach to propagate uncertainties from the density estimates and trend analysis, we analyzed the resulting time series (2011-2019).