The environmental impacts of mining on Gishwati Protected Reserve in Rwanda.

Gishwati forest is part of Gishwati-Mukura National Park. It has a long history of degradation due to human activities. Despite many efforts initiated to restore and protect this concession, the mining activities continue to affect its biodiversity. This study aims at assessing the impact of mining on the landscape, quality of water, soil, and vegetation in Gishwati and its vicinity. Data were collected from five mining sites and one non-mined control site. Methods included direct field observations of the landscape, physico-chemical analysis of water, mine tailings analysis and vegetation inventory, and measurement of the concentrations of metals/metalloids in both water and soil (mine tailings). The findings revealed that mining has accelerated the erosion and the stream/river sedimentation and has created new landforms around some mining sites. The physico-chemical properties of mine tailings piled and scattered on mining sites are not conducive for biodiversity, and the concentrations of metals and metalloids in the water and soil are generally higher on mining sites than on the non-mined area and even higher than international standards. Such high metal/metalloid concentrations threaten both aquatic and terrestrial life as they are likely to cause the extinction of a good number of vegetation species on mining sites. They may also cause toxicity and lead to migration of a variety of animals living in Gishwati. The study recommends the use of mining best practices to safeguard biodiversity in the Gishwati area.

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.

Geographic factors predict wild food and nonfood NTFP collection by households across four African countries.

Wild foods and other nonfood NTFPs are important for improving food security and supplementing incomes in rural peoples' livelihoods. However, studies on the importance of NTFPs to rural communities are often limited to a few select sites and are conducted in areas that are already known to have high rates of NTFP use. To address this, we examined the role of geographic and household level variables in determining whether a household would report collecting wild foods and other nonfood NTFP across 25 agro-ecological landscapes in Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and Ghana. The aim of this study was to contribute to the literature on NTFP collection in Africa and to better understand where people depend on these resources by drawing on a broad range of sites that were highly variable in geographic characteristics as well as rates of NTFP collection to provide a better understanding of the determinants of NTFP collection. We found that geographic factors, such as the presence of forests, non-forest natural areas like grasslands and shrublands, and lower population density significantly predict whether a household will report collecting NTFP, and that these factors have greater explanatory power than household characteristics.