The future of human-chimpanzee coexistence in West Africa: Reconsidering the role of shifting agriculture in chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) conservation planning

The IUCN has recently updated its 2003 western chimpanzee conservation action plan for the period 2020-2030. Recent estimates find an 80% population reduction occurred between 1990 and 2014. Further, 83% of these chimpanzees are estimated to live outside any high-level protected area. Ivory Coast's drastic chimpanzee decline, within a commercial agriculture setting, has much inspired this new protected area-centered action plan. We discuss two contrasting mechanisms contributing to population decline within Ivory Coast in order to assess their relevance to address range-wide conservation issues. We then consider the role of rotational agriculture, which dominates the subsistence economy of neighboring countries, as either a threat or a part of the solution to this subspecies' conservation. We identify knowledge gaps in three critical areas. First, little is known about the habitat types that have experienced the greatest losses across the range of the western chimpanzee. Second, relatively little is known about chimpanzee use of fallowed agricultural fields. Finally, little is known about farmer's ecological knowledge about chimpanzees and their potential to coexist. Establishing new protected areas over the next decade will likely be as an offset to areas used in infrastructure development, implying that ever larger areas will be lost to subsistence farming. We propose to broaden conservation plans for the western chimpanzee. Specifically, we call for deeper consideration of habitat sharing of agricultural fallows within subsistence agricultural landscapes as a means to foster human-chimpanzee coexistence. A focus on coexistence could help mitigate conservation-subsistence farming conflicts.