Abstract
While human–wildlife conflicts are an emerging problem in urban areas, wildlife conservation is needed to sustain human life. Because the degree of conflict depends on land cover types and housing density classes, land-use policies intended to influence both resident and wildlife behavior are needed. This paper numerically simulates the optimal urban boundary regulation to reduce human–coyote conflicts and conserve the ecosystem. Given the parameters of the Denver Metropolitan Area, the optimal location of the urban boundary is estimated as 1 km farther away from the market city boundary. As a result of the optimization more coyotes emerge in urban areas, while fewer herbivores and plants emerge in natural habitats. Because of a “cascade effect”, that is, secondary-and-later effects on the number of certain species through a food chain, the optimal result sees the number of plants increase with a smaller natural habitat than the market size. This indicates that because both direct and cascade effects are affected by the degree of land-use policies, it is necessary to consider the cascade effect when designing these policies.
Highlights
Human–wildlife conflicts are an emerging problem around the world, as some wildlife creatures encroach into cities
This paper examines how to manage the trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and human–wildlife conflicts through land-use regulations that control city size
Most existing studies about the interaction between humans and wildlife focus on land-use competition between humans and wildlife, showing how the sizes of both natural habitats and urban land are endogenously determined [15,16,17,18]. These studies consider only the effects of the respective area sizes of humans and wildlife, not the interaction between humans and wildlife which takes place spatially. [8] developed a theoretical model explicitly considering the human population density, where and how long carnivores stay in the urban areas, where and how long herbivores stay in natural habitats, and plant density in order to understand spatially dependent interactions between humans and wildlife in a closed monocentric city, i.e., a city with an exogenous human population and one Central Business District (CBD)
Summary
Human–wildlife conflicts are an emerging problem around the world, as some wildlife creatures encroach into cities. We use the model of [8], which considers spatial densities of land use for humans, carnivores, herbivores, and plants in cities and natural habitats. [8] developed a theoretical model explicitly considering the human population density, where and how long carnivores stay in the urban areas, where and how long herbivores stay in natural habitats, and plant density in order to understand spatially dependent interactions between humans and wildlife in a closed monocentric city, i.e., a city with an exogenous human population and one Central Business District (CBD) Using this model, they theoretically derived the second-best optimal conditions for land-use policies that protect human lives while preserving the ecosystem.
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