Activities associated with cocaine trafficking threaten two-thirds of the most important landscapes in Central America for 196 forest bird species, including 67 migratory species. This is the key takeaway from a study that colleagues and I published in June 2024 in the journal Nature Sustainability.
Activities associated with cocaine trafficking threaten two-thirds of the most important landscapes in Central America for 196 forest bird species, including 67 migratory species.
Many of the species are unusually concentrated in winter in Central America, which has a comparatively smaller area than their summer breeding regions in North America. Birds perform many important ecological roles, including eating insects, pollinating plants and dispersing seeds, and their presence often is a reliable measure of the overall health of an ecosystem.Drug traffickers cut down tropical forests to create landing strips and roads, and to establish farms and ranches.These activities, in turn, often lead to further forest loss, development and criminal activities.
Traffickers may respond to interdiction efforts by shifting activities to more remote and intact forested areas—zones that are especially important for wildlife. In our study, we combined eBird data on bird abundance and distribution with previously published information on changes in the likelihood that landscapes would experience cocaine trafficking in the future.Suitability, in this case, was estimated from social and environmental features that have been shown to be attractive to narco traffickers.
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