Increase in wild animal consumption across Central Africa

Data Compiling the database We compiled our database by identifying all sources providing data on wild meat consumption in seven Central African countries between 2000 and 2022: Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Republic of the Congo. We also included data from the Cross River Forest landscape in southeast Nigeria, as forests there are contiguous with protected areas in Cameroon. We considered peer-reviewed articles, technical reports, PhD and master’s dissertations, online data repositories and unpublished data, adopting a snowball sampling approach 70 to search reference lists and online libraries. We used wildmeat, wild meat, bushmeat, bush meat and viande de brousse as main keywords, and consumption, nutrition and food as secondary keywords. We defined a study as a set of data collected using a single methodology in a specific study area over a determined timeframe. In this way, each data source could provide more than one study. For example, large projects that monitored multiple regions in different countries were split so that each study area represented a single study. …