Rallying citizen knowledge to assess wildlife occurrence and habitat suitability in anthropogenic landscapes

Abstract

Transforming conservation science and practice calls for rallying people's interest in biodiversity while evaluating the response of biodiversity to anthropogenic transformations. Anthropogenic landscapes are critical as they encompass most of the available spaces for living species and shape evolutionary forces for wildlife in the Anthropocene.We propose a methodology to assess wildlife distribution and habitat suitability in such landscapes based-on local knowledge. With increasing human population and habitat degradation, human-baboon conflicts are exacerbating throughout the Western Cape, South Africa. During participatory mapping workshops, we collected baboon sightings and indices of landscape use by participants to control observer bias to model baboon occurrence using presence-only models (with MaxEnt). We considered different biases associated with citizen data in the modelling process and conducted field validations. Sightings redundancy allows identifying core and extended baboons distribution ranges. We found that the distances to protected areas and wildlife corridors were the main determinants of baboon occurrence while land-cover had little influence. This later result underlies baboons behavioural flexibility in coping with land-use change. Overall, our results are consistent with studies using GPS collars in similar environments.Beyond generating meaningful information to understand wildlife distribution in anthropogenic landscape with a low-cost, fast and non-invasive approach, our methodology allowed local stakeholders to share insights about human-baboon coexistence. Well-designed participatory and collaborative methodologies are critical in conservation programmes, we discuss the role of developing such participatory mapping and modelling approaches to not only produce relevant information when resources are limited but also to unravel local solutions for conservation.