People’s experience, attitudes, and perceptions about wildlife and crop-foraging drive their behavior; in this example, they lead to increased anthropogenic resistance for elephants moving through the region. Credit: Biplab Hazra.
When planning a wildlife corridor, the first ideas that come to mind focus on connectivity of the landscape. What features will the corridor navigate, how long and broad will it be, and where will it go?
Corridors often follow paths of low resistance, based on the relationship between animal movement and features such as terrain, land cover, or habitat. Yet beyond the biophysical landscape, we also know that human activities influence animal movement and survival. For example, if people in a region have low tolerance for wildlife so that there are high rates of illegal wildlife killing, those behaviors will impact the effectiveness of a local corridor even if it encompasses good habitat.
Framing human behavior as “anthropogenic resistance” is a way to explicitly include it in landscape connectivity modeling. Anthropogenic resistance can be defined as the impacts of human behaviors on species’ movement, i.e. an organism’s ability to move through an area, the change in survival, and/or the physiological cost of moving through it. A variety of factors drive and influence people’s behaviors, including attitudes, norms and values, policy decisions, and perceptions of risks or benefits associated with wildlife.
For example, in the context of wolf connectivity in Washington, U.S., anthropogenic resistance takes the form of human behaviors driven by social factors of predator tolerance and dominion values. For leopard connectivity in Golestan Province, Iran, people’s perception of livestock depredation risk has been used to approximate one aspect of anthropogenic resistance.
Green bridges are one way to provide connectivity over busy roads, which would otherwise be sources of high landscape resistance. Here, a pack of wolves uses a green bridge that connects fragmented habitats in Germany. Credit: Hendrik Bluhm/Biogeography Berlin.
Anthropogenic resistance can be considered alongside biophysical resistance by measuring human behaviors in a spatially explicit way. Yet, modeling anthropogenic resistance for connectivity can be complex. Just as we know that features such as habitat, terrain, and available water vary across space and time and at a variety of scales, methods must account for the many ways that people’s behaviors and their drivers vary. Therefore, there are many potential avenues to build on existing methods and design new approaches to account for resistance.
Overall, broadening connectivity approaches to include anthropogenic resistance represents an opportunity for meaningful collaborations between natural and social scientists. This multidisciplinary approach, has the potential to advance connectivity science and improve outcomes for wildlife conservation and management, as well as for people’s livelihoods.
References:
Ghoddousi, A., Buchholtz, E.K., Dietsch, A.M., Williamson, M.A., Sharma, S., Balkenhol, N., Kuemmerle, T. and Dutta, T. 2021. Anthropogenic resistance: accounting for human behavior in wildlife connectivity planning. One Earth 4(1): 39-48.
Carlson, S.C., Dietsch, A.M., Slagle, K.M. and Bruskotter, J.T. 2020. The VIPs of Wolf Conservation: How values, identity, and place shape attitudes toward wolves in the United States. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 8: 6.
Ghoddousi, A., Bleyhl, B., Sichau, C., Ashayeri, D., Moghadas, P., Sepahvand, P., Hamidi, A.K., Soofi, M. and Kuemmerle, T. 2020. Mapping connectivity and conflict risk to identify safe corridors for the Persian leopard. Landscape Ecology 35(8): 1809-1825.
