Conservation Initiatives, Guwahati 781022, India.
Centre for Wildlife Studies, Bengaluru 560042, India.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Jan 3;120(1):e2211482119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2211482119. Epub 2022 Dec 27.
Balancing the competing, and often conflicting, needs of people and wildlife in shared landscapes is a major challenge for conservation science and policy worldwide. Connectivity is critical for wildlife persistence, but dispersing animals may come into conflict with people, leading to severe costs for humans and animals and impeding connectivity. Thus, conflict mitigation and connectivity present an apparent dilemma for conservation. We present a framework to address this dilemma and disentangle the effects of barriers to animal movement and conflict-induced mortality of dispersers on connectivity. We extend random-walk theory to map the connectivity-conflict interface, or areas where frequent animal movement may lead to conflict and conflict in turn impedes connectivity. We illustrate this framework with the endangered Asian elephant , a species that frequently disperses out of protected areas and comes into conflict with humans. We mapped expected movement across a human-dominated landscape over the short- and long-term, accounting for conflict mortality. Natural and conflict-induced mortality together reduced expected movement and connectivity among populations. Based on model validation, our conflict predictions that explicitly captured animal movement better explained observed conflict than a model that considered distribution alone. Our work highlights the interaction between connectivity and conflict and enables identification of location-specific conflict mitigation strategies that minimize losses to people, while ensuring critical wildlife movement between habitats. By predicting where animal movement and humans collide, we provide a basis to plan for broad-scale conservation and the mutual well-being of wildlife and people in shared landscapes.
在共享景观中平衡人类和野生动物相互竞争且常常相互冲突的需求，是全球保护科学和政策面临的一项重大挑战。连通性对野生动物的生存至关重要，但扩散动物可能会与人发生冲突，给人类和动物带来严重代价，并阻碍连通性。因此，缓解冲突和保持连通性对保护来说是一个明显的两难境地。我们提出了一个框架来解决这个困境，并理清动物迁移的障碍和扩散者因冲突而导致的死亡率对连通性的影响。我们扩展了随机游走理论来绘制连通性-冲突界面，或频繁动物迁移可能导致冲突的区域，以及冲突反过来阻碍连通性的区域。我们用濒危的亚洲象来说明这个框架，这种物种经常从保护区扩散出来，并与人类发生冲突。我们在短期和长期内绘制了在以人类为主导的景观中预期的动物迁移，同时考虑了冲突死亡率。自然和冲突引起的死亡率共同降低了种群之间的预期迁移和连通性。基于模型验证，我们的冲突预测模型明确捕捉到动物的迁移，比只考虑分布的模型更好地解释了观察到的冲突。我们的工作强调了连通性和冲突之间的相互作用，并能够确定特定地点的冲突缓解策略，这些策略在确保栖息地之间关键野生动物迁移的同时，最大限度地减少对人类的损失。通过预测动物迁移和人类碰撞的地点，我们为规划大规模保护以及共享景观中野生动物和人类的共同福祉提供了基础。
