Elephants moving through thorny shrubland in the western Okavango Panhandle, Botswana. Credit: E. Buchholtz.
A connected landscape is crucial for maintaining ecosystem processes, including wildlife movement. Areas that are better connected may be used more frequently by individual animals or herds, and many conservation efforts aim to provide useful linkages, paths, or corridors that animals can move through. However, this approach could have consequences in areas where human-wildlife conflict occurs, if high-use areas lead to negative interactions between people and wildlife.
To test whether high-connectivity areas are correlated with increased human-wildlife conflict, we compared connectivity for African savanna elephants with reported incidents of crop raiding. We estimated landscape resistance to movement based on GPS collar data from 15 elephants in northern Botswana, where wildlife and people share the landscape. Circuitscape was used to calculate connectivity, which was then classified and compared with crop raiding frequency over two time scales.
Assessing crop damage caused by elephants. Credit: E. Buchholtz.
Higher connectivity classes were correlated with more frequent crop raids when looking at conflict patterns over a six-year span between 2010 and 2016. However, when looking at elephant crop-raiding incidents within a single growing season (2016), there was no clear connection between connectivity values and whether a field was raided, nor with how frequently a single field was raided that year. This seems to indicate that conflict incidents are not tied solely to connectivity, but over time the pattern emerges due to increased probability of conflict in high-use connected areas.
Over short time periods, such as a single growing season, more proximate factors play a role in whether wildlife presence results in a conflict incident. For example, farmers may guard their fields and actively deter elephants from foraging on crops. However, year after year, the cumulative effect of having elephants moving through high-connectivity areas through agriculture adds up to more frequent conflict in those areas.
A view of the mosaic of agricultural fields along the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Credit: E. Buchholtz.
Human-wildlife conflict is a considerable challenge, and developing deeper understanding behind the drivers and patterns of conflict can be useful for prevention, mitigation, and management strategies. Moreover, to make sure connectivity and corridor planning are as successful as possible, we argue that it is necessary to consider potential impacts on the people that live in areas where they share the landscape with wildlife.
Resources:
Buchholtz, E.K., Stronza, A., Songhurst, A., McCulloch, G. and Fitzgerald, L.A. 2020. Using landscape connectivity to predict human-wildlife conflict. Biological Conservation 248: 108677.
