Patterns of human-wildlife conflict and compensation practices around Daxueshan Nature Reserve, China.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Huang, Cheng Li, Xue-You Shi, Liu-Jun Jiang, Xue-Long
Copyright Year	2018
Abstract	Understanding the spatial patterns of human-wildlife conflict is essential to inform management decisions to encourage coexistence, but it is constrained by the lack of spatially-explicit data. We collected spatially-implicit data of human-wildlife conflicts from 2009–2015 around Daxueshan Nature Reserve, Yunnan, China, and investigated the patterns and drivers of these conflicts. A questionnaire was also designed to capture local resident attitudes toward insurance-based compensation for the losses caused by targeted wildlife. We found that the Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus) was the most conflict-prone animal around the reserve, followed by the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) and Southeast Asian sambar (Cervus equinus). Conflicts were unevenly distributed among seasons, villages, and communities, with several grids identified as conflict hotspots. Poisson models revealed that human-bear conflicts were negatively related to distance to the reserve and proportion of forest, but positively correlated to the proportion of cropland. Binomial models showed that communities affected by crop depredation were positively correlated with the proportion of cropland and negatively correlated with distance to the reserve, whereas communities affected by livestock depredation were negatively correlated with the proportion of cropland. The insurance-based scheme has compensated over 90% of losses, to the satisfaction of 90.6% of respondents. Our results suggest that human-bear conflict could be potentially reduced by eliminating food crops near the reserve boundary and livestock grazing at conflict hotspots. In addition, the insurance-based scheme could be replicated at a broader scale with improvement in loss assessment.
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ISSN	20958137
Journal	Zoological Research [Zool Res]
Volume Number	39
DOI	10.24272/j.issn.2095-8137.2018.056
PubMed Central reference number	PMC6085767
Issue Number	6
PubMed reference number	29872032
Language	English
Publisher	Science Press
Publisher Date	2018-05-31
Publisher Place	16 Donghuangchenggen Beijie, Beijing 100717, China
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. © 2018. Editorial Office of Zoological Research, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Subject Keyword	Human-wildlife conflict Asiatic black bear Spatial heterogeneity Insurance scheme Daxueshan Nature Reserve
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Ecology Animal Science and Zoology Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Nature and Landscape Conservation