Impact of Hunting Activities on the Spatial Pattern of African Cape Buffalo Population: The Case of Kingupira Sector in Selous Game Reserve.

Mnyari, Joseph Augustine (2024) Impact of Hunting Activities on the Spatial Pattern of African Cape Buffalo Population: The Case of Kingupira Sector in Selous Game Reserve. Masters thesis, The Open University of Tanzania.

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Abstract

An increase of human population in the world causes the pressure on the utilization of the existing limited resource. The extinction rate of wildlife resources is reported to increase up to 10,000 times rate in the next century century (22nd Century). The existing data shows that trophy qualities of the African Cape Buffalo are reducing in terms of its size, which is hypothetically caused by over harvesting. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the impact of hunting activities on the spatial pattern of African Cape Buffalo population in Selous Game Reserve at Kingupira Sector. During study the primary and secondary data were used and accessed from TAWA. The simple linear regression, QGIS and Content analysis were used to analyze the data. The linear regression has shown the strong positive relationship between the hunted male African Cape Buffalos and the observed African Cape Buffalos at the period of five years with R2= 50.2. Nevertheless, the study has shown that population of the A. Cape Buffalo is stable with the small variability in terms of numbers where its demography has shown that, the African Cape Buffalo female was more compared to the male. The off-take numbers of African Cape Buffalos per year from 2013 to 2018 were very minimal compared to the number of A. Cape Buffalo locate per quota. The study concludes that, although there is no guideline document on place that govern the hunting activities in Tanzania but quotas setting, and allocation of off take level is promising to ensure the sustainability of wildlife populations and continue to be generating economy of the country from the tourism activities. It is recommended that TAWA should conduct different studies on assessing the off-take levels for different species and to evaluate the potential effects of other anthropological factors to help maintain the population of such species. Key words: Hunting, Spatial Pattern, African Cape Buffalo Index

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