Study title

This collection contains three packages of data relating to hunting and law enforcement in Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary, Cambodia: (1) a household survey intended to estimate the prevalence of different hunting behaviours and wildlife consumption, local communities’ knowledge of rules, and their perceptions of the ranger patrols responsible for enforcing rules, (2) an experiment designed to measure the ability of ranger patrols to detect snares in a tropical forest environment, and (3) an experiment designed to measure the length of time a snare remains an active threat after it is set. Human-caused environmental destruction is a major challenge to the sustainability of life on earth. For effective solutions, we need to learn about damaging behaviours and discover how best to encourage change. Exciting developments in fields concerned with human behaviour (such as economics and psychology) are helping to explain why people make the decisions they do. In parallel, ecologists have developed sophisticated methods for analysing data collected by ordinary people ("citizen scientists"), aided by new technologies such as smart phones. Up to now, these developments have remained separate, but closer integration would benefit both science and practice. Behavioural scientists would gain from the adoption of powerful new analytical techniques from ecology, which enable them to use data collected in new ways to understand how humans interact with the environment. Ecologists would benefit from being able to include a solid theoretical model of human behaviour into their understanding of how ecological outcomes arise from human actions. Managers and policy-makers will benefit from evidence-based understanding of how to change behaviour in the real world. To illustrate how powerful this combination of approaches can be, we will apply them to a key problem facing global conservation: how to manage protected areas so that they can act as effective refuges for endangered species...