Wild Seve: A Novel Conservation Intervention to Monitor and Address Human-Wildlife Conflict

Krithi K Karanth,Anubhav Vanamamalai

doi:10.3389/fevo.2020.00198

Krithi K Karanth, Anubhav Vanamamalai

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2020.00198

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Abstract

Human-wildlife interactions resulting in conflict remains a global conservation challenge, requiring innovative solutions to ensure the persistence of wildlife amidst people. Wild Seve was established in July 2015 as a conservation intervention program to assist people affected by conflict to file and monitor claims and receive ex-gratia payment from the Indian government. In 48 months of operation, Wild Seve filed and tracked 13,808 claims on behalf of those affected from 19 forest ranges around the Bandipur and Nagarahole National Parks in Karnataka, India. This included 10,082 incidents of crop loss, 1,176 property damage incidents, and 1,720 incidents where crop and property loss occurred together. Wild Seve also filed claims for 782 livestock predation incidents, and assisted in 45 human injury incidents and three human fatalities. Elephant related losses comprised 93.9%, and big cat losses comprised 5.5% of reported cases. Wild Seve provides an immediate response to human-wildlife conflict incidents and improves access to ex-gratia payment schemes. Wild Seve is a low cost intervention that uses open-source technology and leverages existing policies to facilitate ex-gratia payments. The Wild Seve model of monitoring and addressing human-wildlife conflict is adaptable and scalable to high conflict regions globally, to the benefit of people and wildlife.

Highlights

Effective conservation efforts have resulted in rebounding wildlife populations in India’s fragmented network of protected areas (Nayak et al, 2020)
Calls to the program were first checked by field staff, and the filtering of spurious or unsubstantiated calls resulted in a total of 13,808 registered cases of Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) (Figure 1)
Wild Seve did not register claims for incidents occurring within encroached land or forest boundaries, or lacking proper land-holding documentation, as they were not covered by ex-gratia payment policies (Karanth et al, 2018)

Summary

Introduction

Effective conservation efforts have resulted in rebounding wildlife populations in India’s fragmented network of protected areas (Nayak et al, 2020). Such localized increases, along with changes in land and habitat use, rapid development, and growing human populations have been associated with increased reporting and severity of human-wildlife interactions (DeFries et al, 2010; Sodhi et al, 2010; Chartier et al, 2011; Karanth and Kudalkar, 2017). Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) incidents resulting in losses to people or wildlife pose a major conservation challenge (Treves et al, 2006; Madden and McQuinn, 2014). Affected families may become antagonistic and retaliate by injuring or killing “problem” animals, adversely affecting conservation efforts (Choudhury, 2004; Lingaraju and Venkataramana, 2014; Manral et al, 2016; Kalam et al, 2018).

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