How the intersection of wildlife ecology and social science can improve human-wildlife conflict management
By Ezra Stepanek
Bruna Ferreira tried to go into her conversations with the people living around Atlantic Forest State Park without expectations. That was the point of Fantastic Detectives, the program she leads in central Brazil aimed at developing community-driven strategies for coexistence between people and wildlife. With farms, ranches, and villages surrounding the 3.6 square miles of protected area, it seemed like a recipe for conflict. There were some cases of mountain lions and other predators killing livestock, but Ferreira and her team were not making any assumptions. Instead, they were asking the community to define the problems they experienced and share their ideas for living alongside wildlife.
She was still skeptical when she heard story after story of black jaguar sightings. “My grandfather saw a black jaguar,” one rancher told her. “I was driving, and I saw one off the road,” another claimed. “It seemed really impossible, because there haven’t been any register of [black] jaguars in the area for decades,” she says. Then, just a few months after hearing these stories, the team caught a black jaguar on the wildlife cameras they set up in the state park. “People knew about it earlier than any of us that were researching there,” she says. “It was amazing to see and hear and then look through the people’s stories with new eyes.”
Fantastic Detectives is part of an emerging field that combines social and ecological understanding to attain a better picture of the complex interactions within a landscape shared by people and wildlife. This is a departure from conservation management and planning that focuses only on ecological data, like habitat suitability, and disregards people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors completely or until the end. Meaningfully including people from the beginning, Ferreira and others say, is a far more effective way to reduce human-wildlife conflict and improve conservation outcomes.
“Generally, we see when there is a coexistence project, there are [conservationists] that come and say, ‘These are the methods you can use to avoid predation [of cattle] and all that,’ but they don’t often ask what the farmers want or what the ranchers want,” says Ferreira. Situations like this often result in regulations that locals feel are forced on them and don’t reflect the situation on the ground. After being left out for so long, communities can be wary of engaging with researchers at all.
Fantastic Detectives, with support from the Cerrado Mammal Conservation Program and Colorado State University’s Center for Collaborative Conservation fellowship program, plans to develop a conservation and coexistence action plan that involves local people every step of the way. “We want this action plan that can be really implemented and can be made in collaboration with everybody, so everybody has ownership of the process,” Ferreira says. Hearing stories from the local people, like black jaguar sightings, has been the first step in building trust between the local people and the team. Their discussions and workshops with locals are centered around conserving the iconic, but threatened, jaguar, mountain lion, hoary fox, and maned wolf. The Fantastic Detectives have also presented in schools, hosted a fire training, and shared what they captured on camera traps to open the conversation.
Already, Ferreira has noticed a world of difference in how friendly the people are compared to the beginning of their research. One farmer, who was one of the team’s first interviewees, called her a month after they visited to report a huge jaguar pawprint on his land. He sent pictures and invited the team to come back to visit. “It was really special because after a month away, he still remembered us and talked to us,” says Ferreira. The key, she says, is just letting people into the conversation. “When you just give them time to talk, they engage in the projects because it’s more near what they know.”
Because they are still in the early stages of their work, the Fantastic Detectives have yet to observe tangible conservation improvements. Nevertheless, Ferreira is hopeful their efforts to create a collaborative space will not only foster human-wildlife coexistence but also increase citizen participation in conservation efforts.
Dr. Keifer Titus also studies conflict between agriculture and conservation, but on working lands in Montana. Before starting the field work for his PhD in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology from Clemson University, he had seen and heard a lot of negativity about ranchers in the West. “The people that [do] extractive agriculture or agriculture in general almost always get a bad rap, right? Like, they’re the ones doing the harm for the wildlife.” But, he says, “when I got out there and interacted with these folks…it couldn’t have been more opposite. These people care more about the land than most. They want to see wildlife doing well.” Those conversations showed him that “if we could just, from the beginning, get these stakeholders on the same page, it just would do so much better for conservation and preservation of culture and livelihoods,” says Titus.
Like Fantastic Detectives, Titus’s work is grounded in bringing local stakeholders into the conversation from the beginning, specifically to coproduce science, which he says can create better conservation strategies for both people and wildlife. “Without public buy in, most of the time [wildlife restoration and conservation efforts] are unsuccessful, especially in the long term,” says Titus. Where his work goes beyond community engagement is combining data about ranchers’ attitudes towards wildlife with common spatial modeling techniques to create a map of social and ecological conditions on a landscape. “We’re really good at modeling the environmental side. A lot of times we can have the best habitat available for the species we’re looking to restore or conserve, but if social conditions aren’t right, it’s a barrier to achieving a lot of the restoration goals that we might have,” says Titus. Being able to see where both factors are favorable, called areas of socio-ecological suitability, can help conservationists make more informed decisions on where to focus their efforts.
For example, part of Titus’s work was trying to identify the best place to do habitat restoration for mountain lions in and around Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. To do this, he developed maps to identify places with both high habitat value for mountain lions and high local tolerance for them. To measure tolerance, Titus and his team sent out mail surveys to Montana ranchers across the plains region asking them to agree or disagree with statements related to their attitudes towards the species, their support for incentives and conservation for the species, and how they behave toward the species on their land. Titus mapped the survey results, relating tolerance to things like the proportion of public lands and the presence of conservation easements around respondents’ ranch lands. Then, he modeled habitat suitability according to land type, elevation, terrain, and the distance to roads and water. Based off only the habitat data, the public land in the wildlife refuge appeared to be the best candidate for habitat restoration. But tolerance was relatively low there. Conversely, further north of the wildlife refuge in areas with more private land, the habitat quality was much lower but the tolerance for mountain lions was the highest, which “seemed backwards to us from the ecology side of things,” says Titus.
Since Titus’s framework was one of the first of its kind, he was uncertain if the suitability results reflected an accurate picture of the landscape. He had the opportunity to share his results at the Nature Conservancy’s Matador Ranch Science and Land Management Symposium, where wildlife researchers, ranchers, and the public come together to discuss the latest research. Titus and his team spoke with some of the same ranchers surveyed to collect tolerance data, who confirmed the accuracy of the predictive maps. Because higher quality mountain lion habitat is in the wildlife refuge, those working around it are more likely to have had negative interactions with mountain lions and therefore lower tolerance. The ranchers living where mountain lions don’t frequent as much have higher tolerance because they haven’t had any issues with them. Bringing the two sets of data together helped create a clearer picture than each on their own. “It hit home that it’s so much more than habitat, and it causes us to need to think creatively about how we’re aiming for restoration,” says Titus, who now works as a postdoctoral scholar in the Oregon Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Science at Oregon State University.
Though his model is among the first, socio-ecological integration is a growing field. A 2023 literature review in Landscape Ecology found 104 articles that used integrative approaches like Titus’s, with the majority from 2020 or after. There were several different approaches in analysis, including attempts to understand the complicated drivers behind tolerance and incorporating predictions about the outcomes of possible management strategies. Common research questions included where on a landscape human-wildlife interactions occurred, what ecological and social factors impacted interactions the most, and if interactions could be accurately predicted to improve management strategies.
The review also pointed out challenges and opportunities for growth, particularly around the measurement of sociological data. According to Titus, social variables like attitudes and tolerance can be hard to map onto a landscape, fluctuate often, and take time and money to repeatedly survey for. A lack of standard methodology, on the other hand, makes collaboration and comparison across studies difficult. But none of these challenges are stopping Titus. “While it might not be systematic, necessarily, from a Western science perspective, there’s tons of qualitative information that can really help us move the needle for wildlife.”
The more research there is, the better. As new studies fill in gaps and streamline the process, socio-ecologically integrated approaches will become easier to implement widely and may start to change norms in the conservation community towards always including diverse voices in the conversation. Titus is very excited at the possibilities: “I think this is going to be the next frontier of how we approach wildlife restoration in working lands.”
Ezra Stepanek is a WyACT Science Journalism Intern and an undergraduate student at the University of Wyoming. He is studying environmental systems science, environment and natural resources, and communication.
Header image: A black jaguar and a mountain lion photographed by wildlife cameras in Atlantic Forest State Park (Courtesy Bruna Ferreira).
