THE SCIENCE
Human activities are causing major changes to biological communities.
The major threats to biodiversity, as identified by IUCN, are habitat loss and degradation, invasive alien species, over-exploitation of natural resources, pollution and diseases, and human-induced climate change. While most of these have been studied in detail and at large spatial scales, over-exploitation of animals has mostly been studied in detail at local scales.
OFFTAKE aims to collate information from available local, detailed studies on exploitation and combine these using a range of statistics, modelling and meta-analytical methods to quantify the level of offtake of terrestrial species world-wide, as well as investigate the drivers associated with offtake levels.
Offtake data most commonly collected comes from market surveys, consumption questionnaires and hunter surveys. OFFTAKE is interested in collating all types of available information to produce a global assessment of the distribution, quantity and quality and any spatial differences among the exploitation of wild species.
Various units or measures of offtake data can be accommodated in the database (e.g. number of carcasses, weight of species etc.).Research efforts on the extraction of many terrestrial species tend to be focused more on charismatic species such as large-mammals.
OFFTAKE will collect data from all taxonomic groups, provided they are terrestrial, in order to produce an overview across all species groups.
At OFFTAKE, we are interested both in answering fundamental scientific questions as well as producing strong policy-relevant tools and indicators of change. Our work aims to investigate global offtake from a variety of angles. Here are a few of our research questions:
1) How does the composition of taxonomic groups being exploited vary globally and at different spatial scales?
2) What is the estimated total global offtake of terrestrial species?
3) How does the proportion of threatened species in the catch vary by location?
In the future, the OFFTAKE database aims to become a valuable tool for informing conservation policy and action at multiple spatial scales.
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