In many rural areas of Lao PDR, wildlife continues to be a crucial source of food and income. Specifically, various species of wildlife or individual animals are frequently traded and can be found for sale along roadsides or in local markets. However, the local community’s comprehensive understanding of the threats posed by biodiversity loss remains insufficient. In this study, we aimed to address this gap by conducting a survey of the illegal hunting of wild animals in three provinces of Lao PDR, focusing on areas where the local population heavily relies on natural resources for their livelihoods. These natural resources serve as a vital source of income to meet the daily household expenditures, potentially shifting hunting from subsistence to commercial purposes. We conducted interviews 40 hunters, and documented wildlife species that were sold at roadside. Moreover, each species was categorized according to its conservation status based on the IUCN Red List conservation status. We documented a total of 3,295 hunted individuals, including 2,146 birds (36 species), 1,081 mammals (15 species), and 68 reptiles (6 species). Even though most of the species hunted are classified with low conservation concern presently, some of them may potentially become at risk in the future. We showed that a large number of individuals, belonging to several species, are hunted in the wild by local communities of Lao PDR. These preliminary findings are valuable for assessing the potential threat posed by hunting and trade to the conservation of these species. While the majority of species identified in this study currently face low conservation concerns, they could become vulnerable or designated as at-risk species if hunting intensifies with an increasing number of hunters in the future.

Rapid economic development can pose a threat to the biodiversity of tropical countries. In Laos, this is manifested by the conversion of natural forests into plantations, even though this area is one of the biodiversity hotspots of Southeast Asia. Beetle communities can be good indicators of the impact of anthropogenic pressure on natural ecosystems. In this study, we analyzed for the first time a countrywide inventory of Coleoptera to assess the ecological and anthropogenic drivers of beetle communities in Laos. We examined beetle communities (described at the family level) across the country, located in distinct habitat types, in order to understand the impact a rapid increase in human activities has on the region’s biodiversity. We found that beetle abundance had declined in plantations compared to natural forests. At the same time, we observed fewer beetle families in plantations overall, but at the scale of sampling sites there was no difference in local diversity compared to natural forests, suggesting a homogenization of beetle communities in anthropogenic habitats. Although results are certainly sensitive to our coarse classification of beetle specimens into families, the negative impact of the conversion of natural tropical forests into agriculture area can still be clearly demonstrated. Our findings highlight that it is possible to make use of unstructured large-scale inventories to explore how beetle communities responds to landscape changes induced by human activities. We suggest that sampling beetle communities can be used as an ecological indicator to monitor anthropogenic impacts on tropical ecosystems.