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Figure 9 in Human-wildlife conflict as a barrier to large carnivore management and conservation in Turkey

Figure 9. Responses by occupation for the question "Does the wild animal you see harm you?" as part of a human opinion survey conducted in 2010 and 2014 in villages surrounding the Sarıkamış-Allahuekber Mountains National Park in eastern Turkey. Results are pooled across years.

Figure 12 in Human-wildlife conflict as a barrier to large carnivore management and conservation in Turkey

Figure 12. Previous knowledge of wildlife ecotourism and desire to participate in future opportunities of survey respondents to a human opinion survey conducted in 2010 and 2014 in villages surrounding the Sarıkamış-Allahuekber Mountains National Park in eastern Turkey. Results are pooled across the two survey years.

Figure 6 in Human-wildlife conflict as a barrier to large carnivore management and conservation in Turkey

Figure 6. Responses by survey year for the question "Does the wild animal you see harm you?" as part of a human opinion survey conducted in 2006, 2010, and 2014 in villages surrounding the Sarıkamış-Allahuekber Mountains National Park in eastern Turkey.

Figure 7 in Human-wildlife conflict as a barrier to large carnivore management and conservation in Turkey

Figure 7. Property damage from wildlife experienced by survey respondents to a human opinion survey conducted in 2006, 2010, and 2014 in villages surrounding the Sarıkamış-Allahuekber Mountains National Park in eastern Turkey. Results are pooled across years.

opencc-zeroJan 2022View details →

Data from: Predicting habitat suitability and connectivity for management and conservation of urban wildlife: A real-time web application for grassland water voles

<ol> <li>Natural habitats in urban areas provide benefits for both humans and biodiversity. However, to achieve biodiversity gains we require new techniques to determine habitat suitability and ecological connectivity that will inform urban planning and development.</li> <li>Using an example of an urban population of water voles (Arvicola amphibius) we developed a habitat suitability model and a resistance-surface-based model of landscape connectivity to identify potential connectivity between areas of suitable habitat. We then updated the environmental variables according to new urban development plans and used our models to generate spatially explicit predictions of both habitat suitability and connectivity.</li> <li>To make models accessible to urban and conservation planners we developed an interactive mapping tool that provided users with a graphical user interface (GUI) to inform conservation planning for this species.</li> <li>The model found that habitat suitability for water voles was related to distance from key environmental variables, such as built-up areas and urban green spaces, while the connectivity model identified important corridors connecting areas of potential distribution for this species.</li> <li>Future development plans altered the potential spatial distribution of the water vole population, reducing the extent of suitable habitat in some core areas. The interactive mapping tool made available suitable habitat and connectivity maps for conservation managers to assess new planning applications and for the development of a conservation action plan for water voles.</li> <li>Synthesis and applications: We believe this approach provides a framework for future development of nature conservation tools that can be used by planners to inform ecological decision making, increase biodiversity and reduce human-wildlife conflict in urban environments.</li> </ol>

opencc-zeroMay 2022View details →

Reducing risky interactions: Identifying barriers to the successful management of human-wildlife conflict in an urban parkland

Managing activities that result in human-wildlife conflict is a challenging goal for modern scientists and managers. In recent years, the self-motivated feeding of wildlife by humans has garnered popularity but with consequent risks for the health and safety of both parties. This has resulted in calls for management in areas of high contact, e.g., parklands. Traditional controls are typically utilised (i.e., signage, patrols), yet their success is varied, leading to a rise in research aiming to improve them. This research has primarily focused on language and design, with little attention paid to the role that audience type (i.e., international tourists versus locals/residents) may play in their success. Proportions in audience type present can vary both between parks and spatially within a single park, however, controls are usually applied homogeneously with no consideration for how response may vary between these groups. Here, we performed a robust before-after study across two summers using a wild fallow deer population in a public park that are commonly fed by visitors as our model. We deployed controls, following best practices as outlined by the literature, and tested their overall effectiveness. We then identified key areas with differences in visitor type proportions and tested for variation in success between them. We found that the number of visitors feeding the deer significantly decreased overall after the introduction of controls, although interactions were not eliminated entirely. We discovered that the effectiveness of these controls varied with changes in visitor type, with the most positive effects occurring in areas with more international tourists and no significant effect occurring in areas dominated by resident visitors. Notably, of the food offerings remaining, the proportion of foods that could be perceived as 'nutritionally beneficial' increased in both sites, marking overall changes in the behaviours of even those visitors who refused to stop feeding. These findings highlight the importance of target audience research in human-wildlife conflict management. We recommend that authorities aiming to reduce these interactions perform systematic surveys to identify the audience type present and cater controls accordingly to maximise their success.

opencc-zeroMay 2022View details →

Data from: When can model-based estimates replace surveys of wildlife populations that span many discrete management units?

Monitoring widely distributed species on a budget presents challenges for the spatio-temporal allocation of survey effort. When there are multiple discrete units to monitor, survey alternatives such as model-based estimates can be useful to fill information-gaps but may not reliably reflect biological complexity and change. The spatio-temporal allocation of survey effort that minimizes uncertainty for the greatest number of units within a budget can help to ensure monitoring efforts are optimized. We used aerial survey-based population estimates of moose (Alces alces) across 30 Wildlife Management Units (WMUs) in Ontario, Canada to parameterize simulated populations and test the performance of different monitoring scenarios in capturing WMU-specific annual variation and trends. Firstly, we tested scenarios that prioritized conducting a survey for a unit based on one of three management criteria: population state, population uncertainty, or number of years between surveys. Also incorporated in the decision framework were WMU-specific costs and annual budget constraints. Secondly, we tested how using model-based estimates to fill information-gaps improved population and trend estimates. Lastly, we assessed how the utility (based on minimizing population uncertainty) of using a model-based estimate rather than conducting a survey was impacted by population density, severity of environmental stressors, and years since the last survey. Interval-based monitoring that minimized the number of years between surveys captured accurate trends for the highest number of WMUs, but annual variation was poorly captured regardless of management criteria prioritized. Using model-based estimates to fill information gaps improved trend estimation. Further, the utility of conducting a survey increased with time since the last survey and was greater for populations with low densities when the severity of environmental stressors was high, while being greater for populations with high densities when environmental severity was low. Overall, the utility of aerial survey monitoring was strongly associated with WMU-specific monitoring precision and the predictive power of model-based estimates. If long-term trends are evident then there is greater value in using alternatives such as model-based predictions to replace surveys, but model-based estimates may be a poor substitute when there is strong annual variation and when using a simple model.

opencc-zeroJun 2024View details →

Proactive management outperforms reactive actions for wildlife disease control

Finding effective pathogen mitigation strategies is one of the biggest challenges humans face today. In the context of wildlife, emerging infectious diseases have repeatedly caused widespread host morbidity and population declines of numerous taxa. In areas yet unaffected by a pathogen, a proactive management approach has the potential to minimize or prevent host mortality. However, we typically lack critical information on the disease dynamics in a novel host system, have limited empirical evidence on efficacy of management interventions, and lack validated predictive models. As such, quantitative support for identifying effective management interventions is largely absent, and the opportunity for proactive management is often missed. Here, we consider the potential invasion of the chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, whose expected emergence in North America poses a severe threat to hundreds of salamander species in this global salamander biodiversity hotspot. We developed and parameterized a dynamic multi-state occupancy model to forecast host and pathogen occurrence, following expected emergence of the pathogen, and evaluated the response of salamander populations to different management scenarios. Our model forecasts that taking no action is expected to be catastrophic to salamander populations. We also show that proactive action is expected to maximize host occupancy outcomes compared to 'wait and see' reactive management, thus providing quantitative support for proactive management opportunities. Additionally, we found that Bsal eradication is unlikely under any evaluated management options. Contrary to our expectations, even early pathogen detection had little effect on Bsal or host occupancy outcomes. Our analysis provides quantitative support that proactive management is the optimal strategy for promoting persistence of disease-threatened salamander populations. Our approach fills a critical gap by defining a framework for evaluating management options prior to pathogen invasion and can thus serve as a template for addressing novel disease threats that jeopardize wildlife and human health.

opencc-zeroMar 2023View details →

Residents perspectives on human-wildlife conflict management to build community resilience in Chitwan National Park, Nepal

<ol> <li>Human-wildlife conflict can significantly impact economic, social, and ecological systems critical to promoting sustainable development. Effectively managing conflicts between people and wildlife that share a common landscape requires the implementation of effective management strategies that aim to reduce the impacts of HWC and promote coexistence as preferred by the community. However, many studies have often overlooked social aspects, especially the residents' perceptions of HWC management, that can help build community resilience.</li> <li>Residents and wildlife share a common landscape in the Chitwan National Park in Nepal. Competition for resources grows as the human-modified landscape provides a new form of habitat for wildlife. We used Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) to capture the residents' (n=506) perspectives on the importance of HWC management strategies and their performance by park management to prioritize strategies that could help build community resilience.</li> <li>We found notable mean performance-importance gaps for the eight HWC management strategies, representing the park management's inability to meet the desired need of farmers and non-farmers. The IPA matrix grid shows the three strategies - skill, livelihood, and compensation - that need immediate attention from park management as they fall under high-priority strategies in quadrant II. The two-way ANOVA results revealed that the residents' perspectives on importance and performance in all management sectors differ.</li> <li>We conclusively recommend developing site-and context-specific HWC management plans that consider the affected community's livelihood needs, which are essential for increasing the operational effectiveness of HWC management. Park management should prioritize strategies in sectors more vulnerable to HWCs to secure community support for long-term conservation goals.</li> <li>This study will be a key reference for identifying context-specific management strategies that incorporate community resilience in the management of human-wildlife conflict. This could inform HWC management policy and conservation planning to achieve coexistence that benefits both people and wildlife, particularly in low-income countries with similar socio-ecological settings. Overall, our findings provide a new perspective on human-wildlife conflict management that policymakers, researchers, and protected area managers around the world can use to build community resilience to facilitate coexistence.</li> </ol>

opencc-zeroMar 2023View details →

Incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitat assessments for rapid post-fire management: A woodpecker case study

Spatial and temporal variation in fire characteristics – termed pyrodiversity – are increasingly recognized as important factors that structure wildlife communities in fire-prone ecosystems, yet there have been few attempts to incorporate pyrodiversity or post-fire habitat dynamics into predictive models of animal distributions and abundance to support post-fire management. We use the black-backed woodpecker – a species associated with burned forests – as a case study to demonstrate a pathway for incorporating pyrodiversity into wildlife habitat assessments for adaptive management. Employing monitoring data (2009–2019) from post-fire forests in California, we developed three competing occupancy models describing different hypotheses for habitat associations: (1) a static model representing an existing management tool, (2) a temporal model accounting for years since fire, and (3) a temporal-landscape model which additionally incorporates emerging evidence from field studies about the influence of pyrodiversity. Evaluating predictive ability, we found superior support for the temporal-landscape model, which showed a positive relationship between occupancy and pyrodiversity and interactions between habitat associations and years since fire. We incorporated this new temporal-landscape model into an RShiny application to make this decision-support tool accessible to decision-makers: <a href="https://birdpop.org/pages/bbwoPredPostFireDist.php">https://birdpop.org/pages/bbwoPredPostFireDist.php</a>.

opencc-zeroJun 2023View details →

Data from: How can we tackle interruptions to human-wildlife feeding management? Adding media campaigns to the wildlife manager's toolbox

In recent years, wildlife managers have been seeking ways to reduce the occurrence of independent, recreational human-wildlife feeding interactions, which continue to gain global popularity and may have negative effects on the humans and wildlife involved. Current popular methods, such as signage and posters, have yielded mixed results and their application is often interrupted, though the effects of these interruptions on feeding levels are currently unknown. This has led to calls to both identify a management option that can be applied successfully from a distance and to determine whether this action may assist in recovering long-term programmes from the potential effects of interruptions. Marketing and media tools have been shown to successfully change human behaviours in conservation campaigns, flagging them as a potential tool that could be applied to human-wildlife feeding management. Here, we performed a 4-year study using a wild fallow deer population in a popular urban green space as our model system. We tracked changes in human feeding behaviours across four different management stages. These included pre-management (stage 1), during traditional management (i.e. "don't feed the deer" signage, stage 2), mid-interruption (i.e. COVID-19 pandemic, stage 3), and during the application of a structured media campaign (stage 4). We found that feeding by visitors decreased during traditional management (stage 2), but rapidly returned to pre-management levels during the interruption (stage 3) despite traditional controls still being in place. However, we discovered that feeding dropped significantly after the release of a media campaign (stage 4), despite the audience and conditions being unchanged. We also identified which imagery and educational messages resonated with viewers; information that can be applied to future campaigns in other locations. We, therefore, recommend that wildlife managers both investigate and be prepared for the negative effects that interruptions of any type (e.g. the recent COVID-19 pandemic, other interruptions to funding) may have on ongoing management campaigns of this ilk. We recommend that media campaigns be explored as a potential tool to reduce the occurrence of the unregulated feeding of wildlife by humans in these sites, thereby promoting better human-wildlife coexistence.