Caracterización de las ganaderías de vacuno de carne en la zona de la Cooperativa Andaluza Ganadera del Valle de los Pedroches

publishedTomo I. Sección: Sistemas Ganaderos - Economía y Gestión. Sesión: Vacuno carne

Hunting management in relation to profitability aims: red-legged partridge hunting in central Spain

22 páginas, 3 tablas, 2 figuras.Game management is widely implemented in Spain, affecting more than 70 % of land cover. Management intensity may be linked to the financial aims of hunting estates, but no study of these aspects has been developed in Spain, where commercial hunting is common. Through interviews with game managers and field surveys, we quantified physical and economic traits, management techniques and hunting methods in a sample of 59 small game hunting estates located in south-central Spain (where Red-legged partridge hunting has the highest socio-economic importance in the country). We compared non-commercial estates (aimed for leisure, managed mainly by local hunting societies) and commercial estates (aimed at financial benefit); among the latter, we also assessed “intensive” estates (a special category of commercial estates licensed to release farm-reared partridges without temporal or numerical limits throughout the hunting season). Commercial estates had more intensive management, including more and larger partridge releases, higher density of supplementary feeders and more intensive predator control. Thus, any positive or negative effects on biodiversity of these management techniques would be higher in commercial than in non-commercial estates. Commercial estates also retained more natural vegetation, which may help to enhance the landscape and biodiversity value of farmland in central Spain. On the other hand, differences in management and hunting styles were most marked between intensive and other type of estates (both commercial and non-commercial); this indicates that intensive estates are qualitatively different from other small game estates, both ecologically (hunting based on releases and driven shooting) and economically (higher inputs and outputs). It would be desirable to find ways to quantify the environmental or social costs and benefits of different management techniques, and integrate them in the economics of hunting estates.This work was supported by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development through project HUNT (212160, FP7-ENV-2007-1), Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (CGL2008-04282/BOS) and the Consejería de Agricultura of Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha (JCCM). Additionally, this paper uses partial data from a project funded by the Fundación Fauna y Flora. S. Diaz-Fernandez had a predoctoral grant jointly financed by the European Social Fund and by JCCM, in the framework of the Operational Programme PRINCET 2005-2010. M. Delibes-Mateos is currently holding a Juan de la Cierva research contract awarded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and the European Social Fund. We thank all game managers for their collaboration, and ADEMAC and the Asociación de cotos de caza menor Sierra de Alcaraz-Campo de Montiel for facilitating this collaboration with game managers. We thank Steve Redpath, Mick Marquiss, Justin Irvine and two anonymous referees for useful comments on the manuscript.Peer reviewe

Improving decision-making for sustainable hunting: regulatory mechanisms of hunting pressure in red-legged partridge

Knowledge about how hunting pressure is determined, and the relative efficacy of different mechanisms to regulate harvest, can help to improve the managers’ decision-making process. We developed a general framework about the decision-making process that regulates red-legged partridge (Alectoris rufa) hunting pressure in central Spain based on information from a focus group and individual interviews with game managers. We also used available information to compare the efficiency of different tools thus improving some decision steps. We evaluated the cost-effectiveness of different population monitoring methods as a way to reduce uncertainty on partridge availability to hunters. Additionally, we investigated the relationship between annual harvest and various regulatory mechanisms of partridge hunting pressure used in the study area to identify the most potentially useful one to limit annual take-off. Game managers usually set hunting pressure after a qualitative assessment on population abundance prior to the hunting season, but this decision was frequently modified during the course of the hunting season according to variations in catch or perceived abundance at that time. Our results showed that kilometric abundance indices (counting partridges from cars along line transects) was a simple cost-efficient and reliable estimate of partridge density (estimated by Distance sampling). A variety of regulatory mechanisms were used by managers. The variables that most affected annual harvest (in addition to partridge abundance) were the number of driven-shooting days, and hunter density in walked-up hunting days, suggesting that their adjustment will be the most efficient regulatory mechanisms. We conclude that adequate monitoring on population abundance should be a critical step for managers’ decision-making, and that a better understanding of the relative value of regulatory mechanisms, combining social and ecological approaches, would help improving our understanding of any human-mediated system, thus leading to better management recommendations.Work was supported by the European Commission (7th Framework Programme for R&D through project HUNT, 212160, FP7-ENV-2007-1); Consejería de Agricultura of JCCM; by the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (CGL2008-04282/BOS), and by CSIC (PIE 201330E105).Peer reviewe