Mapping major types of hunting across the South American Dry Chaco and Chiquitano forests

Hunting is a central, culturally embedded relationship between people and nature, yet also drives wildlife declines with far‐reaching consequences for ecosystems and people. It is also a highly diverse practice, involving a wide range of actors and hunting techniques, both of which determine the social‐ecological impacts of hunting. However, the geography of different types of hunting remains unclear, constituting a barrier for conservation and sustainability planning. Here, we develop an approach to identify and map key types of hunting across the vast Dry Chaco and Chiquitano tropical dry forests (950,826 km 2 ). We use a structured literature review and expert elicitation to identify key types of hunting and link these to a typology of land systems to map the spatial footprints of hunting types and how they changed between 1985 and 2023. We identify four major hunting types– traditional, retaliatory, commercial and recreational hunting – each associated with specific actors, practices and socio‐ecological contexts. All hunting types were widespread, with large areas associated with multiple, overlapping hunting types. The spatial footprints of hunting types, as captured by our land systems, increased considerably over time, particularly for retaliatory hunting (+54.6%), recreational hunting (+46.8%), and commercial hunting (+32.7%). Traditional hunting had historically increased less (+20.6%) and declined recently. By conceptualising hunting as a diverse socio‐ecological phenomenon rather than a uniform threat, we show how different hunting types are geographically distributed, interact and vary as landscapes change due to land‐use change. Our land‐system‐based approach thus provides a useful tool for better representing the social‐ecological diversity of hunting in sustainability planning and policy at broad geographic extents. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.