Human interactions with wildlife are a defining experience of human existence. These interactions can be positive or negative. People compete with wildlife for food and resources, and have eradicated dangerous species; co-opted and domesticated valuable species; and applied a wide range of social, behavioral, and technical approaches to reduce negative interactions with wildlife. This conflict has led to the extinction and reduction of numerous species and uncountable human deaths and economic losses. Recent advances in our understanding of conflict have led to a growing number of positive conservation and coexistence outcomes. I summarize and synthesize factors that contribute to conflict, approaches that mitigate conflict and encourage coexistence, and emerging trends and debates. Fertile areas for scholarship include scale and complexity, models and scenarios, understanding generalizable patterns, expanding boundaries of what is considered conflict, using new tools and technologies, information sharing and collaboration, and the implications of global change. The time may be ripe to identify a new field, anthrotherology, that brings together scholars and practitioners from different disciplinary perspectives to address human–wildlife conflict and coexistence.

Bearing the costs of human-wildlife conflict: The challenges of compensation schemes" (2005). Faculty Scholarship. Paper 15.

Human-wildlife conflict is a major conservation challenge, and compensation for wildlife damage is a widely used economic tool to mitigate this conflict. The effectiveness of this management tool is widely debated. The relative importance of factors associated with compensation success is unclear, and little is known about global geographic or taxonomic differences in the application of compensation programs. We reviewed research on wildlife-damage compensation to determine geographic and taxonomic gaps, analyze patterns of positive and negative comments related to compensation, and assess the relative magnitude of global compensation payments. We analyzed 288 publications referencing wildlife compensation and identified 138 unique compensation programs. These publications reported US$222 million (adjusted for inflation) spent on compensation in 50 countries since 1980. Europeans published the most articles, and compensation funding was highest in Europe, where depredation by wolves and bears was the most frequently compensated damage. Authors of the publications we reviewed made twice as many negative comments as positive comments about compensation. Three-quarters of the negative comments related to program administration. Conversely, three-quarters of the positive comments related to program outcomes. The 3 most common suggestions to improve compensation programs included requiring claimants to employ damage-prevention practices, such as improving livestock husbandry or fencing of crops to receive compensation (n = 25, 15%); modifying ex post compensation schemes to some form of outcome-based performance payment (n = 21, 12%); and altering programs to make compensation payments more quickly (n = 14, 8%). We suggest that further understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of compensation as a conflict-mitigation tool will require more systematic evaluation of the factors driving these opinions and that differentiating process and outcomes and understanding linkages between them will result in more fruitful analyses and ultimately more effective conflict mitigation.

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Human-tiger conflict occurs in Indonesia but mediate disturbance areas such as multiple-use forests where tigers and people coexist. In Indonesia there is a there is little recent information about the scope of the problem, and adequate policies are not in place to address need to develop a definition of problem tigers, a database to track conflicts, and a process to respond immediately to the conflict. Published and unpublished reports of conflict between Sumatran tigers Panthera tigris sumatrae, people conflicts when they occur. Without a better understanding of human-tiger conflict and a concerted eCort to proand their livestock were collected and analysed to characterize the extent, distribution and impact of human-tiger actively address the problem, future landscape-level tiger conservation and management eCorts may be jeopardized. conflict on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Reportedly, between 1978 and 1997, tigers killed 146 people and injured 30, and killed at least 870 livestock. Conflict was