As great ape populations around the world continue to decline, largely due to anthropogenic activities, conservation programs aimed at supporting these efforts have had mixed success. Here, we evaluate our community‐based conservation program in Gishwati forest, Rwanda, aimed at helping to restore biodiversity and ecosystem services using chimpanzees as a flagship species. We examine the effectiveness of this program on reducing one of the ongoing threats to Gishwati's population of chimpanzees, illegal cattle grazing as well as the program's influence on the size of the chimpanzee population. We monitored illegal cattle grazing during several study periods between 2009 and 2019 in Gishwati forest following the implementation of our conservation program in 2008 that included law enforcement, community engagement, and research components. We found that when our conservation program was active, illegal cattle grazing was reduced to low levels. We also observed an increase in the chimpanzee population size during the 11 years since we started our conservation program. We examine how this reduction in cattle grazing and increase in chimpanzee population size may have been influenced by our community‐centered approach and discuss the future of our conservation work in Gishwati.

中文翻译：

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卢旺达 Gishwati 森林的社区保护和黑猩猩研究

随着世界各地的类人猿种群持续减少，主要是由于人为活动，旨在支持这些努力的保护计划取得了不同的成功。在这里，我们评估了我们在卢旺达 Gishwati 森林开展的基于社区的保护计划，该计划旨在利用黑猩猩作为旗舰物种帮助恢复生物多样性和生态系统服务。我们研究了该计划在减少对 Gishwati 黑猩猩种群的持续威胁之一、非法放牧以及该计划对黑猩猩种群规模的影响方面的有效性。在我们于 2008 年实施保护计划（包括执法、社区参与和研究部分）之后，我们在 2009 年至 2019 年的几个研究期间监测了 Gishwati 森林的非法放牧。我们发现，当我们的保护计划活跃时，非法放牧的牛只减少到了低水平。我们还观察到，自我们开始保护计划以来的 11 年里，黑猩猩的种群数量有所增加。我们研究了我们以社区为中心的方法如何影响放牧的减少和黑猩猩种群数量的增加，并讨论我们在 Gishwati 的保护工作的未来。