Katherine Meier

The Cuvette Centrale, the world’s largest swamp forest and tropical peatland, is home to the Republic of Congo’s Lac Télé Community Reserve (LT). Congo’s sole ‘community reserve’, LT houses 20,000 forest-dependent people and a remarkably high density of western lowland gorillas. Despite generations of hunting pressure, this population of critically endangered gorillas, as well as those of LT’s other focal conservation species – central chimpanzees and forest elephants – have remained stable. However, LT’s seasonal flooding drives extreme adaptations by both humans and animals, rendering the landscape a marginalized, understudied space. Beyond periodic mammal density surveys, no long-term or fine-scaled research has been done here. This project addresses the fundamental question: How does the LT landscape support high gorilla densities? This complex, conservation-centric question has many ecological and cultural components which my dissertation research seeks to address. However, in this study, I wish to focus on the most foundational ecological question: What dietary resources are spatio-temporally available to these gorillas and their potential dietary competitors? The goal of this project is to set up vegetation transects that cover the major forest sub-types at LT (terra firma forest, raphia swamp forest, hardwood swamp forest, and seasonally flooded forest) and use these to collect data on vegetation composition and monthly phenology. This project will set the stage for the larger dissertation project, namely, using noninvasive fecal samples to assess the diets of LT gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) as they relate to seasonal fruit availability, and to measure dietary overlap between gorillas, sympatric chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) and forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis).