TOPPFORSK: Developing heuristics for human-wildlife coexistence in the Anthropocene

This project set out to develop heuristics, or general principles, to help achieve coexistence between humans and wildlife in shared landscapes. Over the course of five years the project team have produced 100 scientific papers, in addition to a range of technical reports and popular science pieces. These papers cover a wide range of disciplinary perspectives including ethnography, ecology, geography, legal studies, policy studies, and wildlife management. Methodology varied from interviews, questionnaires and document analysis, to using GPS-telemetry, genetics, isotope analysis, remote sensing and simulations. The case studies mainly focused on large mammals and included studies from all continents, although there was a clear focus on Eurasia (Europe and Central Asia). Our research covered topics such as wildlife distributions and movement, monitoring methods, models of socio-ecological systems and discourse analysis of different conservation strategies. The results reflect both the challenges and opportunities of coexistence. For example, updated mapping of the distribution of large herbivores and large carnivores in Europe demonstrate the amazing recovery these species have had during the 20th century, as well as their ability to thrive in landscapes that are heavily dominated by humans. Similar examples of species recovering and persisting in unlikely landscapes can be found across the world ? for example leopards in India and jaguars in Brazil. However, the presence of wildlife in these landscapes is also associated with many conflicts, both between people and wildlife (e.g. livestock depredation, man-eating, spread of diseases, vehicle collisions, crop damage), and between different groups of people about how to manage wildlife (e.g. hunting vs non-hunting, protected areas vs shared landscapes). We have also found cases where species have declined, or become locally extinct, even in apparently protected wilderness locations. Conceptually, we distilled out three major questions that need to be addressed when exploring the potential for coexistence. (1) Is the wildlife able to live in our modified landscapes? This is largely a question of ecology. (2) Are people able to tolerate the proximity of wildlife? This is a question about attitudes, values and economies. (3) Are different groups of people with different values and interests concerning wildlife able to negotiate their differences and coexist? This is a question of legislation, policies, institutions and governance. From our body of research we were able to identify some key conceptual and operational insights that have broad scale application on how to go about addressing these questions and achieving coexistence. - Coexistence will take different forms in different places ? so there are no universal approaches. - Coexistence is not an absence of conflict ? rather it is a constraining and directing of conflict into acceptable channels. - Coexistence can only be achieved within a wildlife management of sustainable use policy paradigm, as opposed to more hands-off approaches such as rewilding, wilderness or animal rights / compassionate conservation. - Sharing space requires co-adaptation, with wildlife adapting to humans and humans adapting to wildlife. This requires a recognition that humans will modify wildlife ecology, and that wildlife necessitates humans modifying their practices. - Governing the conflicts between people about wildlife, and how to manage it, may be more complicated than managing the actual relationships between humans and wildlife, i.e. coexistence is as much about human-human coexistence as human-wildlife coexistence. - Landuse planning is an essential measure to ensure that the ecological needs of wildlife are met, and can be a useful arena for negotiating the social conflicts around different human interests. - Coexistence therefore requires effective institutions for governance that integrate science and diverse stakeholder perspectives within political frames.

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Wildlife populations, large herbivores and large carnivores, have declined in the last 100 years when viewed globally. However, there are many exceptions, with populations of many species in areas like Europe, stabilizing or increasing. These cases give hope for achieving coexistence between humans and wildlife, even when considering the dramatic changes that humans are making to the biotic and abiotic systems of the planet. Coexistence can come in many forms. It can be based around the idea of sharing space or maintaining separated spaces. It can involve controlled exploitation, or total protection. It can involve efforts to conserve wildlife in wilderness settings or in novel ecosystems. While conservation biology has created a robust science around predicting declines, it has not yet managed to produce effective theory to predict or guide recovery and the maintenance of states of coexistence. This project seeks to address this lack and aims to develop a theory of coexistence, with accompanying principles and operational heuristics. This involves exploring the ways in which different management strategies can be aligned with diverse social, cultural, institutional and ecological circumstances. In order to reach these goals the study recognizes that management must consider both social and ecological systems, and will accordingly adopt a multi-disciplinary approach. This will involve; (1) an in-depth discourse analysis and policy analysis of different conservation strategies, (2) spatial analysis of animal movement and distribution data, (3) the use of management strategy evaluation modelling of a linked social-ecological system to explore different scenarios, and (4) the analysis of potential monitoring systems that permit upscaling of effort to management contexts. The study will focus on the ecoregion of Europe and Central Asia, and work on the rational of learning from data-rich cases to inform data-poor systems.