ABSTRACT Community conservation areas offer an alternative to land management in East African countries by employing governance strategies that transition decision‐making from state‐ to community‐controlled processes emphasising the rights of local people. Because this conservation model embraces local livelihoods, research is needed to examine how common forms of human presence found within community conservation areas impact local biodiversity. To test how these anthropogenic stressors affect the distribution of a wide range of mammal species, we present results from the first systematic camera trap survey conducted at Ipole Wildlife Management Area (WMA) in the Sikonge District of Tanzania. Between July and November 2022, we placed camera traps throughout the WMA to quantify the diversity of the mammal community and examine how mixed‐intensity forms of anthropogenic presence, such as villages, roads, trails, and detections of human activities, correlate with mammal occupancy. We also assessed how the Koga/Ugalla River and vegetation structure influence mammal occupancy during the dry season. In total, we detected 49 wild mammal species. Using multi‐species spatial occupancy models for 39 species with sufficient observations, we found that mammal occupancy across the full community was positively correlated with proximity to roads, trails, and water and negatively correlated with village proximity. Our results demonstrate that signs of human presence within community conservation areas can impact mammal distributions, highlighting the need to account for anthropogenic features when managing biodiversity in such landscapes.
Novovitch et al. (Thu,) studied this question.