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Globally, illegal sport hunting can threaten prey populations when unregulated. Due to its covert nature, illegal sport hunting poses challenges for data collection, hindering efforts to understand the full extent of its impacts. We gathered social media data to analyze patterns of illegal sport hunting and wildlife depletion across Brazil. We collected data for 2 years (2018-2020) across 5 Facebook groups containing posts depicting pictures of illegal sport hunting events of native fauna. We described and mapped these hunting events by detailing the number of hunters involved, the number of species, the mean body mass of individuals, and the number and biomass of individuals hunted per unit area, stratified by Brazilian biome. We also examined the effects of defaunation on hunting yield and composition via regression models, rank-abundance curves, and spatial interpolation. We detected 2046 illegal sport hunting posts portraying the hunting of 4658 animals (∼29 t of undressed meat) across all 27 states and 6 natural biomes of Brazil. Of 157 native species targeted by hunters, 19 are currently threatened with extinction. We estimated that 1414 hunters extracted 3251 kg/million km2. Some areas exhibited more pronounced wildlife depletion, in particular the Atlantic Forest and Caatinga biomes. In these areas, there was a shift from large mammals and reptiles to small birds as the main targeted taxa, and biomass extracted per hunting event and mean body mass across all taxonomic groups were lower than in other areas. Our results highlight that illegal sport hunting adds to the pressures of subsistence hunting and the wild meat trade on Brazil's wildlife populations. Enhanced surveillance efforts are needed to reduce illegal sport hunting levels and to develop well-managed sustainable sport hunting programs. These can support wildlife conservation and offer incentives for local communities to oversee designated sport hunting areas.

1. Involving communities in sustainable wildlife management in tropical forests can ensure food security and livelihoods of millions of forest dwellers that depend on wild meat, but also safeguard hunted species. Mathematical models have been developed to assess hunting sustainability; but these require empirical information on reproductive parameters of the prey species, often challenging to obtain. 2. Here, we suggest that if local people can accurately identify the reproductive status of hunted animals in the field, these data could fill the existing knowledge gap regarding species’ life-history traits and enable better assessments of hunting impacts. 3. We first tested whether local people in 15 rural communities in three Amazonian sites could accurately diagnose, before and after training, the pregnancy status of hunted pacas (Cuniculus paca), which we use as our model. We then applied the results from these tests to correct reproductive status data of hunted specimens, voluntarily collected over 17 years (2002-2018) as part of a citizen science project in one of our study sites. We ran generalized additive models to contrast these corrected reproductive rates with those obtained from the direct analysis of genitalia by researchers, and with indices describing game extraction levels (catch-per-unit-effort, CPUE, and age structure of hunted individuals). 4. Before training, interviewees correctly diagnosed pregnancy in 72.5% of tests, but after training, interviewees accurately diagnosed pregnancy in 88.2% of tests, with high improvements especially for earlier pregnancy stages. Monthly pregnancy rates determined by hunters and by researchers were similar. Reported annual pregnancy Page 3 of 45 Confidential Review copy Journal of Applied Ecology 4 rates were negatively correlated with CPUE, and positively correlated with the percentage of immatures in the hunted population, in accordance to an expected densitydependent response to variations in hunting levels. 5

The Amazon is the largest forest system on Earth, supporting a variety of indigenous societies, small farmers, extractivists, and artisanal fishers with different cultures and relations with wildlife. However, the Brazilian Amazon has lost more than 436, 000 km2 of forest in the last 30 years, and Protected Areas may not be enough to ensure the conservation of biodiversity and cultural heritage. On the other hand, formal alliances with rural inhabitants can decentralize resource management, strengthen full-time surveillance systems, reduce overall costs, and boost conservation effectiveness. Here, we provide an assessment of the two largest community-based management (CBM) programs in the Brazilian Amazon, which are inducing strong social and ecological benefits at a large scale. First, we show the benefits from CBM of giant arapaima, which has promoted an impressive stock recovery of the worlds largest freshwater scaled fish (Arapaima spp.), generating income and other benefits for rural livelihoods in Amazonian floodplains. Second, we show that CBM of freshwater turtles (Podocnemis spp.) has also promoted the population recovery of overexploited turtles, contributing to the maintenance of important cultural values. We also identified a set of social and institutional principles, and the intrinsic values of natural resources, which can help develop successful CBM programs. Finally, we discuss how these principles can strengthen existing initiatives and/or inspire new ones. Reconciling biodiversity conservation and local aspirations for rural development is an urgent socioecological demand in Amazonia. Raising the profile of successful initiatives can be a powerful strategy to disseminate a message of hope and action to local and international agencies that can support the scaling up of these successful models., isbn: 978-303041686-7 978-303041685-0, Pages: 99-111