Data collection

The study covered five of the most active bushmeat sites in Côte d’Ivoire. It includes (i) four bushmeat markets in the district of Abidjan, namely Yopougon Siporex (5°21’N, -4°04’W), Abobo Grand Marché (5°26’N, -4°01’W), Abobo Mairie (5°25’ N, -4°01’W) and Adjamé (5°21’N, -4°01’W), and (ii) the restaurants of Toumodi (6°33’N, -5°01’W) as a renowned hub for bushmeat trafficking in central Côte d’Ivoire (Dindé et al., 2017).

Bushmeat sites were surveyed from December 2019 to January 2021, including the period during which governmental measures were taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (Milleliri et al., 2021: see Fig. 1). We chose to measure the weekly effect of governmental measures from the first week of April 2020, i.e. the week following that of when the declaration of state of health emergency and of the closure of chop chop bars was announced. The end of governmental measures was fixed to the second week of October 2020, as there was no specific date associated to the final release of constraints.

Sites were visited by JKG, SGB and a trained field assistant twice per week between 08.00 am and 2.00 pm, every three days. An additional control survey was conducted in September 2021 (week 92 after survey start) in order to compare the observed number of sellers with that from predictive growth curve modelling (see below).

We counted the number of sellers on each site as a proxy of the bushmeat activity. We systematically verified that each seller had his/her own stall(s), and was not a collaborator of another seller. We posit that the number of sellers –as one of the supply determinants of a market (Key et al., 2000)– is expected to positively correlate with the quantity of bushmeat supply. Weekly estimates per site were derived from the mean counts of sellers per week per bushmeat site (Appendix Table 1). Sellers were informed of the objectives of the study and participated to the survey on a voluntary basis.