A multispecies assessment of wildlife impacts on local community livelihoods.

Rocío A Pozo,O Sarobidy Rakotonarivo,Isabel L Jones,Nils Bunnefeld,A Bradley Duthie,Jeremy J Cusack,Jeroen Minderman,Eric G Leflore

doi:10.1111/cobi.13565

Rocío A Pozo, O Sarobidy Rakotonarivo + Show 6 more

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https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13565

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Abstract

Conflicts between the interests of agriculture and wildlife conservation are a major threat to biodiversity and human well-being globally. Addressing such conflicts requires a thorough understanding of the impacts associated with living alongside protected wildlife. Despite this, most studies reporting on human-wildlife impacts and the strategies used to mitigate them focus on a single species, thus oversimplifying often complex systems of human-wildlife interactions. We sought to characterize the spatiotemporal patterns of impacts by multiple co-occurring species on agricultural livelihoods in the eastern Okavango Delta Panhandle in northern Botswana through the use of a database of 3264 wildlife-incident reports recorded from 2009 to 2015 by the Department of Wildlife and National Parks. Eight species (African elephants [Loxodonta africana], hippopotamuses [Hippopotamus amphibious], lions [Panthera leo], cheetah [Acinonyx jubatus], African wild dogs [Lycaon pictus], hyenas [Crocuta crocuta], leopards [Panthera pardus], and crocodiles [Crocodylus niloticus]) appeared on incident reports, of which 56.5% were attributed to elephants. Most species were associated with only 1 type of damage (i.e., either crop damage or livestock loss). Carnivores were primarily implicated in incident reports related to livestock loss, particularly toward the end of the dry season (May-October). In contrast, herbivores were associated with crop-loss incidents during the wet season (November-April). Our results illustrate how local communities can face distinct livelihood challenges from different species at different times of the year. Such a multispecies assessment has important implications for the design of conservation interventions aimed at addressing the costs of living with wildlife and thereby mitigation of the underlying conservation conflict. Our spatiotemporal, multispecies approach is widely applicable to other regions where sustainable and long-term solutions to conservation conflicts are needed for local communities and biodiversity.

Highlights

Conflicts between the interests of agriculture and those of wildlife conservation are increasingly common (e.g., Shackelford et al 2015; Fischer et al 2017; Egli et al 2018) and currently represent one of the biggest challenges for biodiversity conservation worldwide (Díaz et al 2019)
Understanding patterns and drivers of human–wildlife impacts (HWI) is an important component of managing conservation conflicts (Redpath et al 2013)
Unprotected areas were part of the study site, which was composed of a mixture of agricultural land, human settlements, and savannah shrubland (Pozo et al 2017b). This landscape is home to a wide range of protected African wildlife, including African elephants (Loxodonta africana), hippopotamuses (Hippopotamus amphibius), lions (Panthera leo), cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus), hyenas (Crocuta crocuta), leopards (Panthera pardus), and crocodiles (Crocodylus niloticus), all of which we included in our analyses

Summary

Introduction

Conflicts between the interests of agriculture and those of wildlife conservation are increasingly common (e.g., Shackelford et al 2015; Fischer et al 2017; Egli et al 2018) and currently represent one of the biggest challenges for biodiversity conservation worldwide (Díaz et al 2019). Conservation conflicts often arise as a result of antagonistic interactions between wildlife and human activities (Young et al 2010; Redpath et al 2013) Such human–wildlife impacts (HWI) include livestock depredation by carnivores, crop and property damage by herbivores, and the subsequent retaliatory killing of problem individuals or species by humans. A better understanding of HWIs can enable the development of technical solutions, such as scaring devices or compensation payments, to minimize negative interactions between people and wildlife (e.g., Pozo et al 2017a; Ohrens et al 2019) Addressing the latter can in turn reduce conflict between the interests of conservation and those of other human activities (Baynham-Herd et al 2018)

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