Chocolate Bushbabies: Cocoa Agroforests as Habitat for Galagos (Galagidae) in the Ashanti Region, Ghana

Résumé fourni par la source

ABSTRACT Increased demand for arable land and pastures is a key driver of deforestation in the tropics. Arboreal primates are particularly threatened by deforestation, and although many primate species are restricted to undisturbed natural forests, some can persist in anthropogenic habitats such as plantations and agroforests. In this study, we conducted passive acoustic surveys for galagos (Family: Galagidae) in 38 cocoa agroforests in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. We trained a YOLOv5 convolutional neural network model using a dataset of galago vocalisations from across sub‐Saharan Africa to enable automatic detection of galago calls. Despite a high rate of false‐positive detections (95%), our galago detector model confirmed the presence of at least one species of western dwarf galago ( Galagoides ) in four cocoa agroforests, each situated within 500 m of a remnant forest patch, but > 4 km from the nearest forest reserve. These represent the first scientific records of galagos in cocoa agroforestry systems, although local ecological knowledge likely predates these observations. Further work is needed to determine whether cocoa agroforests form viable habitats for galagos, or whether they function as travel vectors between remnant forest fragments, something that our galago detector can facilitate via passive acoustic monitoring.