Dr. Gaoue is an ethnoecologist, meaning he studies the interaction between humans and their environment, and how that differs in different places. His particular interest is in figuring out systems for more sustainable forest management.

Dr. Gaoue has a B.S. in Forest Engineering from the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin. He completed his Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa, and postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Miami and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Before returning to Knoxville in 2017, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaiʻi.

Using trees for purposes other than timber (e.g., picking fruit or nuts) is commonly thought to be a win-win: people are able to get food and other resources from the trees without destroying the forest. However, there is some evidence that over-exploitation of forests, even without cutting down the trees, can have a negative impact on them. In a recent paper, Dr. Gaoue studied the buttertree (Pentadesma butyracea), which is found across tropical regions of West Africa. In Benin, the buttertree population is threatened both by over-harvesting of seeds, and by being cut down to make room for more farm land.

Comparing forests across dry and moist regions of Benin, Dr. Gaoue and colleagues found that the more seeds harvested from the forest, the lower the density of trees in the forest. However, they did not see an effect on the distribution of different size trees in the forest.

The authors suggest that the relative lack of change observed could be due to asexual reproduction that could compensate in the short term for the loss of seeds. However, it is also possible that the timescale of the effect was just too short to observe. If the forests are compensating with asexual reproduction, that is important to know for forest conservation: that would reduce the diversity of the forest, making it more susceptible to all being wiped out by a single infection.