Abstract
Human population growth has led to increased contact between people and wildlife, with adverse impacts for both, such as damage to economic crops and wildlife persecution. Diversionary feeding, where food is used to draw animals away from problem activities or locations, is sometimes proposed as a socially acceptable conservation action, but little information exists on its success or what influences its efficacy. Here, we review literature on diversionary feeding and evaluate factors contributing to its success or failure. Success varied greatly among studies and successful uptake of diversionary food did not consistently produce outcomes that met stakeholder objectives. Studies often failed to report results in sufficient detail to allow a quantitative evaluation of efficiency. Of 30 trials presented in 21 studies, 13 enabled assessment of outcomes related to the ultimate objective of reducing conflict (related to threatened prey density, crop yield or nuisance reports) and only five of these were considered successful by the researchers conducting the study. A grand mean increase of 15 % in respective measures of success at the outcome stage was found across all studies. Although diversionary feeding is considered expensive, cost-effectiveness analyses were rarely conducted. Only a third of studies reported information on costs and benefits that could be used to inform future management actions. We propose a decision-making framework that incorporates ecological knowledge, financial costs and evidence from previous studies to aid the planning and implementation of diversionary feeding in an adaptive format. Future studies of diversionary feeding should clearly report objectives, results, costs and effort to allow the return-on-investment to be calculated for different levels of management effort.
Highlights
As human populations modify large areas of natural habitat to provide food and other services, interactions between people and wild animals are increasingly common
Whilst we refer to studies on supplementary feeding where details of the experimental design are of relevance to diversionary feeding, the outcomes of these studies were not included in this review
When the persistence of the animals implicated in a human-wildlife or wildlife-wildlife conflict is a fundamental objective of management, diversionary feeding could be considered as an alternative to lethal methods of control
Summary
As human populations modify large areas of natural habitat to provide food and other services, interactions between people and wild animals are increasingly common. Interactions can occur more frequently when conservation efforts result in an increase in population density of certain wildlife species, leading to damage to economic crops (e.g. agriculture and forestry; Sullivan and Sullivan 2008; Barrio et al 2010), threats to human safety (Kaplan et al 2011; Rogers 2011), and predation of commercially valuable species such as livestock (Smith et al 2000) or game (Redpath 2001; Redpath and Thirgood 2009). In some cases, these impacts can lead to wildlife persecution (Woodroffe et al 2005; Fitzherbert et al 2014). The effects of diversionary feeding can be measured at three stages; the initial uptake of diversionary food; the ‘output’ or direct impact of diversionary feeding on the problem
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