A literature review of legal hunting practices

(Poster)

Anna Haukka
anna.haukka@helsinki.fi

1. Digital Geography Lab, Department of Geosciences and Geography, Faculty of Science, University of Helsinki, FI-00014 Helsinki, Finland., Finland
,
Enrico Di Minin
1. Digital Geography Lab, Department of Geosciences and Geography, Faculty of Science, University of Helsinki, FI-00014 Helsinki, Finland. 2. Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, University of Helsinki, FI-00014 Helsinki, Finland, Finland

DOI: 10.17011/conference/eccb2018/107650

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Humans have always hunted for food, recreation, sport or cultural reasons. However, legal hunting practices are increasingly being challenged on sustainability and animal welfare grounds, even if hunting can contribute to reach biodiversity objectives (Di Minin et al. 2016). Previous reviews have especially focused on illegal hunting (Benítez-López et al. 2016). In order to collect information on the sustainability of hunting we reviewed the peer-reviewed English language literature on legal hunting. We used 26 hunting related terms to search for all the literature on legal hunting on WebofScience. We focused on terrestrial ecosystems and species, therefore excluding fishing and whaling. The original search resulted in 2 985 papers. These were screened, based on title and abstract, for papers not addressing legal hunting. After this the remaining 1 608 papers were read through to insure systematic inclusion in the database. We further excluded papers that did not specifically study the impact of hunting on species populations, management, conservation, economics, socio-cultural values, animal welfare, or other sustainability related issues. The final review consisted of 1200 articles published between 1953 and January 2018. Our preliminary results highlight the spatial and temporal patterns of legal hunting in English scientific research and present which species the studies have mainly focused on, as well as the socio-ecological, management, governance and animal welfare implications of legal hunting. Overall, we found that there were fewer papers that covered the overall sustainability, ecological, and socio-economic impacts of legal hunting. Some species were studied extensively in North America, also the location with most studies. Other locations highlighted by the number of studies are some parts of Europe and southern Africa. Our review highlights gaps in research that should be filled by future research and provide evidence in supporting conservation decision making.

References:

1. Benítez-López, A., Alkemade, R., Schipper, A., Ingram, D., Verweij, P., Eikelboom, J., Huijbregts, M., 2017. The Impact of Hunting on Tropical Mammal and Bird Populations. Science, 356:6334, pp. 180-183.

2. Di Minin, E., Leader-Williams, N., Bradshaw, C., 2016. Banning Trophy Hunting Will Exacerbate Biodiversity Loss. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 31:2, pp. 99-102.

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INTRO:
By conducting a systematic review, the authors of this study aim to assess the current scientific knowledge of legal hunting in terrestrial ecosystems and discuss about the main knowledge gaps.
MERITS:
This study presents a systematic review of the scientific literature about legal hunting of terrestrial ecosystem since 1958, involving more than 1200 articles.
CRITIQUE:
The study seems to be very well developed. The only thing I can suggest is that authors are aware that they have not assessed 'the spatial and temporal patterns of legal hunting globally', but rather 'the spatial and temporal patterns of English scientific research about legal hunting globally'.
DISCUSSION:
It would be nice if authors make explicit which knowledge gaps and their implications for policy-making.

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INTRO:
The title identifies the presentation topic as a systematic literature review of legal hunting practices. However, the abstract is more in line with information provided in systematic maps as it identifies what has been studied (species, impacts) and where.
MERITS:
The rationale for the literature review is well provided and the abstract outlines what has been studied and where.
CRITIQUE:
The authors describe their literature review as a systematic literature review. If the aim was to conduct a systematic literature review, there are several problems. It might be that the problem is lack of information in the abstract rather than how the actual review was conducted, but I have outlined the methodological problems nonetheless:

1. How was the review question designed? The abstract gives no information about engagement with stakeholders at the question setting stage.

2. One of the differences between systematic reviews and conventional literature reviews is the inclusion of multiple sources of literature, including grey literature. Yet, the authors state that they used only Web of Science for searching the literature. Hence, by definition this review would not qualify as a systematic review in a strict sense.

3. The authors state that the review consisted of >1200 articles published between 1953 and January 2018. However, they give no essential information about how many articles where found overall (it must be more than 1200 unless search terms were very restricting), and how many articles and for what reason were exluded at each stage of the critical appraisal process. This might be due to the fact that the the search has just been conducted and the authors don't yet have the information. The same applies for some of the criticism below.

4. PICO/PECO terms could have been outlined to improve understanding of what was researched beyond the intervention (i.e. hunting).

5. The authors don't give any information about article inclusion criteria, how they checked for the comprehensiveness of the search, sensitivity of the search string, kappa-test (or other) results for applying the inclusion criteria, and other key elements of the systematic review process.

6. Stakeholders engagement process isn't mentioned at all.

7. The authors don't give any information about the data extraction and analysis.

8. The results don't describe sustainability of hunting (i.e. hunting impacts) but focus on research undertaken on the topic. Maybe by the time of the conference, the authors have results related to the impacts.

As a minor comment, the authors should check that they use past tense consistently throughout the abstract.
DISCUSSION:
This could be a very interesting presentation relevant for broad audience but suffers from methodological weaknesses. I hope the lack of information is due to the fact that the review is currently being conducted but nevertheless, unless the authors include broader sources of literature and abide by the systematic literature review process, they should not call their review systematic.