Human-Wildlife Conflict - Science topic

You can develop it and publish in journals like journal of threatened taxa, animal biology, journal of zoology, current science, etc

The research framework will be for implementing the steps taken throughout the research. It is normally used as a guide for researchers so that they are more focused on the scope of their studies.

Dear Ugyen Dechen, HWC mitigation is a very important aspect of wildlife management. With my experience and knowledge I am sure of one thing that we have to involve the people of the wildlife area itself in the program of wildlife conservation and management. This should include raising awareness about the wildlife among those people, educating their children to get them into the jobs related to the wildlife including research projects, involving those people in these awareness campaigns, keeping the wildlife tourism a government owned facility but staffed with wildlife educated people including those from the area, recruiting the forest & wildlife guards from the area too. Why? Because these people are the major stake holders in these projects. They are the ones who are affected the most by the proclamation of the area as a wildlife refuge. It affects their lives in thousands of ways. If we don't involve them, they will never understand the value of the wildlife. Moreover, they will go against such projects as is happening right now all over India. Such a project with the involvement of the locals will not only raise their awareness but also give them the jobs and professions to survive.

Hi, this isn´t common.

Of course into new protected areas, sometimes urban areas change the use.

Actually our principal problem is to know how the species can to survive to excesive urban areas.

I would suggest that you look at Indigenous peoples for a plethora of accounts of such activities. The indicators are that these peoples lived in close proximity to wildlife of all kinds for thousands of years. A really good example can be found in Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' books The Tribe of Tiger and The Old Way, in which she describes in detail the coexistence of lions and Ju'wasi people in Namibia.

One key issue is the size of the human populations, once humans start increasing in numbers and severely altering habitats, the chances for successful coexistence go down, however, many species try to persist in area where humans. For example black bears live quite well in areas where humans are, in some areas they hibernate under summer cabins, the humans who use those cabins have adjusted (see Lynn Rogers, simply Google him ans you will get lost of hits).

One of the best modern examples is the City of Boulder, CO and it accommodation of cougars. You could Google this and find lots of stories, but the best accounts is The Beast in the Garden by David Baron.

Basically, it seems that anywhere humans are willing to make the necessary adjustments that the wildlife is willing to coexist.

Here an Spanish example: changes in human-wildlife conflict and in perception of wildlife in general (chiefly of some predators, as wolves)

through time (200 years), in the rural areas of Northern Spain. The frame are the great snowfalls, and human-wildlife interactions during them.

"Los efectos de las grandes nevadas históricas sobre la fauna en Asturias, a través de la prensa" You can find easily it in researchgate.

Regards!

Crop Protection and Its Effectiveness against Wildlife: A Case Study of Two Villages of Shivapuri National Park, Nepal.

Hope this may be helpful

Dr Pradeep Vyas in Lower Gangetic water

I am going to provide an answer which is rather indirect. There is a resident community, upstream the Port-Reitz Creek in Mombasa, Kenya. The resident population was, initially made up of local people. They understood the importance of mangroves as a habitat for fish, crabs, lobsters etc. Consequently, they conserved the mangrove habitat as it was bringing benefits in terms of income from fishing activities. They were not keeping any data in terms of fish catch income, but, all they knew was that life was good. Then came another community, initially, not resident to the area.

The new community saw the mangrove forest as a source of charcoal and building poles. They started harvesting these from the mangrove forest. The consequence was a decline in fish catch and income for the indigenous local population. This resulted in disharmony between the two communities occasioned by the resource use conflict. While I have some knowledge about this issue, I did not venture to find out if data was generated, However, my colleagues in Research Gate, particularly those involved in marine science studies, may have better insight on the subject. Does my answer tickle the mind of such one colleague to provide a more comprehensive answer to the questioner, I wonder?

Habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, loss of food species and prey, encroachment of forest fringe areas and corridors influence the movement of wild animals in to the human habitations.

possible sources could be males' (mature and young) moving during  the rutting period. Wild boar adapt to smell and fences easily; moreover, rutting is rather strong driver for moving

Hi!

It will depend on what kind of information you want to obtain ( i.e, values, attitudes, socioeconomic factors, perceptions, conflict management measures, etc), as well as the time you have for your research. Structured questionnaires are a quick way to get information, however, this instrument could omit background information that would allow you a better understanding about the conflict. Then, semi or structured interviews  can enhance the topic if you want to get qualitative information (historic or cultural factors, behavior, etc). There are an other methods like focus groups, etnography and others that need more time to get information.

I suggest these papers so you can make a better decision. ( Links below)

I hope it works for you

Kind regards

Maybe Quentin Evrard could help you for the case of South-East Cameroon:

CapeNature (Western Cape Province, South Africa) has an active wild boar/feral pig eradication programme going here, but concentrates on eradication and what damage these animals do and what they eat. No other research on sensibilities. If you want to engage with conservation officilas dealing with this project contact Riaan van der Walt (rvanderwalt@capenature.co.za), Jaco van Deventer (jvdeventer@capenature.co.za) or Deon Hignett (dhignett@capenature.co.za).

Hi Yadav, maybe you should contact Dr. Arumugam (see http://www.indiawilds.com/diary/wild-india-ecology-of-striped-hyaena/) or Priya Singh (you can find her on my fb friends list).

Cheers!

These are excellent paper that you can review to help you build a relevant questionnaire to document wildlife and human interaction/conflict in your study area. I hope this will help you. 

Just a word of caution on terminology:

Reintroductions and Introductions are two very different issues: the former indicates the release of a taxon to an area where it was present in earlier - historical - times and later got extinct, whereas the latter indicates the release of an alien (allochthonous) taxon to a new area. The release of wolves to Yellowstone has been a reintroduction, but the release of South American coypus and North American grey squirrels to Europe or that of red foxes to Australia have been introductions. The former are positive operations - if properly conducted - and tend to restore pristine zoocoenoses, whereas the latter are quite negative operations as they tend to upset ecosystems.

In both cases you should expect consequences on the ecosystems, usually favourable in the first case, nearly always negative in the second case. The effects of weather and climate integrate with these consequences (or rather the other way round!).

I'm not sure that I would define them as "political drivers", it is more a case of political apathy, i.e. overlooking the issue or, worse, passively allowing trafficking to take place in deference to the vested interests of wealthy individuals that support the politicians.  For me, wildlife trafficking is market-driven - remove the market and trafficking disappears, but remove the politics and trafficking will still occur.

Dear Abhinaya,

As others have already mentioned, there are many livestock insurance schemes in action around the world already. Please see these links to papers show-casing carnivore-related examples from the field. Some are conceptional, others evaluate experiences made.

http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1659/0276-4741(2000)020%5B0226%3APTSLAE%5D2.0.CO%3B2 

http://www.livingwithlions.org/ScientificPapers/Evalution-of-compensation-scheme,Maclennan-et-al.pdf 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2003.00060.x/abstract 

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9985347&fileId=S003060531500068X 

Comprehensive reviews of the topic have been published by Philip Nyhus and Adrian Treves who have extensive experience with carnivore damage compensation schemes. For example, try access:

Nyhus, P.J., Fischer, H., Osofsky, S. and Madden, F. (2003) ‘Taking the bite out of wildlife damage: The challenges of wildlife compensation schemes.’ Conservation in Practice, 4(2) pp. 37-40.

Nyhus, P.J., Osofsky, S.A., Ferraro, P., Madden, F. and Fischer, H. (2005) ‘Bearing the costs of human-wildlife conflict: The challenges of compensation schemes.’ In Woodroffe, R., Thirgood, S. and Rabinowitz, A. (eds.) People and Wildlife: Conflict or Coexistence? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 107-121.

Treves, A., Jurewicz, R.L., Naughton-Treves, L. and Wilcove, D.S. (2009) ‘The price of tolerance: wolf damage payments after recovery.’ Biodiversity and Conservation, 18(14) pp. 4003-4021.

Regards,

Florian

We recently published a research paper on a field experiment which was conducted by Awely and the SLCS in Zambia. We could show that cultivating alternative crops (ginger, garlic, lemon grass) reduces crop losses due to African elephants in South Luangwa, Zambia. Please look at our publication.

Hi Ajaz,

Experience from Bhutan may be highly relevant in your context.  Here, colleagues from two local research centers have developed a low tech electric fencing method together with farmers.  Labor is contributed by the farmers and material costs amount to max 35000 INR (500 Euro) per kilometer in case the terrain is steep.  They use wires on wooden posts, locally fabricated isolators, an energizer and a solar charger and the system has been successfully applied in several communities (we have just erected a few such fences at one of our project sites in Bhutan as well).  For wild boar, success rate is close to 100%, whereas for Assamese and Rhesus macaques it lies above 60% reduction in crop loss if I remember figures correctly.  There are no publications available on this work, but I can put you in touch with relevant colleagues from Bhutan in case you want it.

Hi John and all,

The project mentioned by Danlico is Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network (http://roadkill.tw) which collects roadkilled animal observations from Facebook, and transforms the crowdsourced data to structured data for scientific purposes. You can browse all observation data from website, as well as download data via API. Enclosed some papers for your references.

I work in Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica. And you? Your work place seems to be same as me. Might be we can talk face-to-face. 

Dongpo

Lot of work has been done on these two species.Ecological aspects are well studied, however ecological parameters varied from place to place. Decide your parameters and browse google.

Hi,

On the African continent, there is quite a lot of literature if interested. If I may suggest a few of our publications from a theoretical and more practical perspective. Disease transmission at the wildlife-livesotck interface is our main concern in African socio-ecosystems:

Best,

AleX

Hello, got your request through Ana Isabel Queiroz

From a different disciplinary perspective I would recommend this reference:

KNIGHT, J Natural enemies people wildlife conflict from anthropological perspective

Hein, actually since my last post there have been a number of published studies on the language/culture correlation with carnivore tolerance (see links).

Interesting stuff!

Hi, as an erstwhile park ranger, it is my experience that visitors do and do not read signs, and sometimes deliberately ignore signs. This is for a number of reasons: a general obedience; not paying attention; deliberate disobedience. Paris need to be adequately policed, it is the only method of ensuring park safety and environmental integrity.

Thanks for those PDF 

Hi Emilian

In the USA they learned valuable lessons with wolf conservation. The wolf range has increased and it is possible to hunt wolves in several states. A person like Ed Bangs may be a great help to set up a conservation strategy.

My perception is that it usually is the carnivores that give way to the farmers, not the other way round. We did a review of lessons learned to conserve large carnivores and mitigate conflict (PDF attached). Due to the volume of articles we limited it to African large carnivores, but from the literature it seems that these basic principles apply wider than Africa.

We are busy with two articles, wild dog and cheetah in Botswana, showing that enough wild prey resulted in lower conflict levels. For cheetahs the critical level of wild prey was 20% of the available biomass.

Obtaining financial benefits from hunting (at sustainable levels) do help to make farmers more tolerant, even if the financial losses are more than the gains from the hunting.

Regards

Christiaan

Thanks for keeping us updated! That's a pitty, but I think, that with a seriously iunjured wild animal you had not much to do.

You may be interested to read my publication on this topic. We are currently in year 3 of this 5-year study, if you have any other questions please message me. 

In the Canary Islands one of the main problems with conservation of birds is light pollution, mainly in the case of pelagic seabirds that are active in land by night, coming to their breeding sites or in the fledging period. The problem is very important, as many colonies of Cory's Shearwater are situated close to human settlements (sometimes even to big cities), and there are a lot of casualties linked to public lights, not only with this species, but also with Bulwer's Petrel, Barolo's or Macaronesian Shearwater, etc. Fortunately, from many years there are specific campaigns to reduce the damage of this conservation problem. On such topic there are several papers, like these:

Rodríguez, A. & B. Rodríguez (2009). Attraction of petrels to artificial lights in the Canary Islands: effects of the moon phase and age class. Ibis 151: 299-310.

Rodríguez, A., B. Rodríguez & M.P. Lucas (2012). Trends in numbers of petrels attracted to artificial lights suggest population declines in Tenerife, Canary Island. Ibis 154: 167-172.

Rodríguez, A., B. Rodríguez, Á.J. Curbelo, A. Pérez, S. Marrero & J.J. Negro (2012). Factors affecting mortality of shearwaters stranded by light pollution. Animal Conservation 15: 519-526.

You could get data from some hunting bag statistics. But only for those animals which are counted for hunting bags and which really died!

We are working on this topic (a little bit), it is difficult getting accurate data: The hunters do only report the dead animals, the police only counts those accidents where any animal was hit (and only those, where the drivers want to get money from the insurance), but without species (just game animal)

there will always be a big gap: those hit but did not die, those hit and did die somewhere else, those who died on the road but not reported...

However, there is a lot of literature existing: look on the Web of Knowledge

Here are some:

Baker, P. J., Harris, S., Robertson, C. P. J., Saunders, G., & White, P. C. L. (2004). Is it possible to monitor mammal population changes from counts of road traffic casualties? An analysis using Bristol’s red foxes Vulpes vulpes as an example. Mammal Review, 34(1), 115-130.

Blanco, J. C., & Cortés, Y. (2007). Dispersal patterns, social structure and mortality of wolves living in agricultural habitats in Spain. Journal of Zoology, 273, 114-124. doi: doi:10.1111/j.1469-7998.2007.00305.x

Grilo, C., Bissonette, J. A., & Santos-Reis, M. (2009). Spatial-temporal patterns in Mediterranean carnivore road casualties: Consequences for mitigation. Biological Conservation, 142(2), 301-313. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2008.10.026

Gryz, J., & Krauze, D. (2008). Mortality of vertebrates on a road crossing the Biebrza Valley (NE Poland). European Journal of Wildlife Research, 54, 709-714. doi: DOI 10.1007/s10344-008-0200-0

Peris, S., Baquedano, R., Sánchez, A., & Pescador, M. (2005). Mortalidad del jabalí (sus scrofa) en carreteras de la provincia de Salamanca (NO de España): ¿Influencia de su comportamiento social? Galemys, 17(1-2), 13-23.

Roberts, C. W., Pierce, B. L., Braden, A. W., Lopez, R. R., Silvy, N. J., Frank, P. A., . . . Alpizar, J. (2006). Comparison of Camera and Road Survey Estimates for White-Tailed Deer. Journal of Wildlife Management, 70(1), 263-267.

Rodríguez-Morales, B., Díaz-Varela, E. R., & Marey-Pérez, M. F. (2013). Spatiotemporal analysis of vehicle collisions involving wild boar and roe deer in NW Spain. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 60(0), 121-133.

Thurfjell, H., Spong, G., & Ericsson, G. Factors affecting wildlife-vehicle collisions. 19.

Hi Erik

These are all big questions.

You ask "And what theories underlie such societal changes?"

There is a huge literature on the environmental Kuznets curve that seems to be one large scale generalization. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve

Another theory of general interest is the "forest transition". See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_transition.

There has been quite a lot of research over the last decade to clarify how wealth (change or local variation) relates to dependence on, benefits from, and impact on, natural resources. The PEN work of CIFOR would be a good place to track some of that down. see http://www.cifor.org/pen

Key of course is "our" ability to modify and influence the process and outcomes.

The resilience alliance also has a lot of good stuff on "transformation and change". See http://www.resalliance.org/index.php/e__s_special_feature

What I think is really fascinating is the cultural differences and how these are manifested. Some parts of the world are much more tolerant and respectful of wild nature than others (parts of India and Thailand, parts of Ethiopia etc being positive). Valuing and nurturing such tolerance is something that those of us with conservation aims need to spend a lot more energy on ...

Some of the best work in fisheries in recent years has been to reintroduce more traditional controls and safeguards. See e.g. Johannes, R. E. 2002. The renaissance of community-based marine resource management in Oceania. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 33:317–340.

This requires a much more local and less uniform approach ... but I think the really big question is whether increased democracy (a good thing) will also be good for the environment! It depends ...

Hi Damian,

I'm working especially with Canids so I'm bias in my recommended pappers but here is few paper that might give you a start related to those large predators who had a very hard time in North America during European settlement.

Good luck !

Ripple, W. J., E.J. Larsen, R.A. Renkin and D.W. Smith. 2001.Trophic cascades among wolves, elk and aspen on Yellowstone National Park’s northern range. Biological Conservation 102(3):227-234.

Rutledge, L. Y., B. N. White, J. R. Row, and B. R. Patterson. 2012. Intense harvesting of eastern wolves facilitated hybridization with coyotes. Ecology and evolution 2:19–33.

Bruno, J. F., and B. J. Cardinale. 2008. Cascading effects of predator richness. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6:539–546.

Kellert, S. R., M. Black, C. R. Rush, and A. J. Bath. 1996. Human Culture and Large Carnivore Conservation in North America. Conservation Biology 10:977–990.

Species (populations, and even individuals) differ in their response to human disturbance. Some are more sensitive and others quite tolerant to human proximity. You will need a list of species potentially affected and check if the proposed timing of your disturbance event in question will coincide with breeding (stage?) or maybe another important life stage such as moulting, there's quite some literature about on human disturbance effects on birds and how you can measure the effect of different disturbance stimuli. Most importantly you will need link your measured disturbance responses to potential population level consequences. Such data can then provide the basis for effective conservation management decisions.

yeah sure,

Shades of yellow color are radient and thye can attract attention of any bird or vector from very long distance. If you consider a bird eye view or Google earth view you can easily mark or identify things or structures which are appearing in the shades of yallow colour. Thats the reason how birds know that where to search food and it is ready for harvest.

Another example; when corn fields are near its harvest only at that time birds cause problem now what is the colour of the field from top angle, What is a colour of a fruit when it mature. Most of the times it is in the shades of yellow. so to achieve a repellent effect, the colour of a repellent should'n be attractive to them.

And that is the only reason we make sticky traps with yellow colourd sheets only.

Tigers need to be taught to hunt by their mothers. If this tiger learnt how to hunt livestock then it is quite unlikely that it will begin hunting wild animals. So you will have to live with that, Wherever it is translocated, it will follow its habits, since it probably does not know how to hunt deer. In such a case, the decision lies with the managers, to either catch the tiger and put it in a zoo or have it destroyed. Taking it and setting it free in another tiger's territory is certainly not the solution and I am surprised that wildlife managers there even imagined that translocating the tiger 16 km would solve the problem!

@ Jayson & Asit Thnx for the suggestion!

But this particular bull is different, last year the government decided to kill it, also fired on him, but he escaped. This year again he started killing people. We are still chasing the elephant to capture (sedate) and collar him this time.

I agree with Franck. What is also being tried

is the growl of tigers and chili pepper.

Other:

Regards,

Joachim

You have identified an issue that is common to so many populations of large mammals especially those in close proximity to humans. What are the issue(s) that most contribute to causing the population to be imperiled? Is it poaching? Is it human-bear conflicts?. Is it habitat that is shrinking or being fragmented into smaller and smaller patches? One approach that you might consider is to create economic incentives that local people can realize from having a locally healthy population inhabiting healthy, secure habitat. Also, as Riaz suggests, effective enforcement will be a component of most stratagies.

hi Jane, can we only express the degree of vulnerability as exposure of risk?

Dear Pushpa Jee,

Thank you for your interest, we have actually started collaring of the elephants. Recently we collared a male from Chitwan with GPS collar from Vectronic that we already had. We will purchase 4-5 new collars for more individuals.