Abstract
Understanding the spatial patterns of human-wildlife conflict is essential to inform management decisions to encourage coexistence, but it is constrained by the lack of spatially-explicit data. We collected spatially-implicit data of human-wildlife conflicts from 2009–2015 around Daxueshan Nature Reserve, Yunnan, China, and investigated the patterns and drivers of these conflicts. A questionnaire was also designed to capture local resident attitudes toward insurance-based compensation for the losses caused by targeted wildlife. We found that the Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus) was the most conflict-prone animal around the reserve, followed by the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) and Southeast Asian sambar (Cervus equinus). Conflicts were unevenly distributed among seasons, villages, and communities, with several grids identified as conflict hotspots. Poisson models revealed that human-bear conflicts were negatively related to distance to the reserve and proportion of forest, but positively correlated to the proportion of cropland. Binomial models showed that communities affected by crop depredation were positively correlated with the proportion of cropland and negatively correlated with distance to the reserve, whereas communities affected by livestock depredation were negatively correlated with the proportion of cropland. The insurance-based scheme has compensated over 90% of losses, to the satisfaction of 90.6% of respondents. Our results suggest that human-bear conflict could be potentially reduced by eliminating food crops near the reserve boundary and livestock grazing at conflict hotspots. In addition, the insurance-based scheme could be replicated at a broader scale with improvement in loss assessment.
Highlights
Human-wildlife conflict, which is defined as any interactions leading to negative impacts on the humans or wildlife involved (Pettigrew et al, 2012), is a worldwide conservation issue
For conflicts attributed to the Asiatic black bear, livestock depredation caused disproportional losses compared to the frequency of conflicts (49.6% vs. 18.2%), with an average predation rate of 2.57%
Part 1 was comprised of four villages and accounted for 60.5% of losses, with 99.9% caused by the Asiatic black bear, such that the predation rate (9.5%) was much higher than the average
Summary
Human-wildlife conflict, which is defined as any interactions leading to negative impacts on the humans or wildlife involved (Pettigrew et al, 2012), is a worldwide conservation issue. Local residents often experience variously negative impact due to the presence of wildlife, including crop raiding, livestock depredation, and human casualties (Dickman et al, 2011). Prevention before conflict and mitigation after conflict are two general strategies used to tackle human-wildlife conflict (Marchal & Hill, 2009; Mishra et al, 2003; Pettigrew et al, 2012). Prevention is widely recognized as the better strategy (Goodrich, 2010; Treves & Karanth, 2003), and includes guarding and fencing of livestock, zoning of land, Science Press and increasing prey abundance for carnivores (Guo et al, 2012; Mishra et al, 2003). Spatially-implicit conflict data are well documented by compensation schemes, which could allow promising insight into the spatial patterns of human-wildlife conflict (Chen et al, 2016b)
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