Elephant crop raiding is one of the most relevant forms of human-elephant conflict (HEC) in Africa. Northern Botswana holds the largest population of African elephants in the world, and in the eastern Okavango Panhandle, 16,000 people share and compete for resources with more than 11,000 elephants. Hence, it is not surprising this area represents a HEC ‘hotspot’ in the region. Crop-raiding impacts lead to negative perceptions of elephants by local communities, which can strongly undermine conservation efforts. Therefore, assessing trends in conflict levels is essential to developing successful management strategies. In this context, we investigated the trend in the number of reported raiding incidents as one of the indicators of the level of HEC, and assessed its relationship to trends in human and elephant population size, as well as land-use in the study area. For each of these factors, we considered data spanning historical (since the 1970s) and contemporary (2008–2015) time frames, with the aim of comparing subsequent inferences on the drivers of crop raiding and predictions for the future. We find that the level of reported crop raiding by elephants in the eastern Panhandle appears to have decreased since 2008, which seems to be related to the reduction in agricultural land allocated to people in recent years, more than with human and elephant population size. We show that inferences regarding the drivers of HEC and predictions for the future are dependent on the time span of the data used. Although our study represents a first step in developing a HEC baseline in the eastern Panhandle, it highlights the need for additional multi-scale analyses that consider progress in conservation conflict to better understand and predict drivers of HEC in the region.

26Crop losses from elephants are one of the primary obstacles to the coexistence of 27 elephants and people and one of the contributing causes to elephant population 28 decline. Understanding if some individuals in an elephant population are more likely 29 to forage on crops, and the temporal patterns of elephant visits to farms, is key to 30 mitigating the negative impacts of elephants on farmers. We used camera traps as a 31 novel technique to study elephant crop foraging behaviour in farmland adjacent to 32 the Udzungwa Mountains National Park in southern Tanzania from October 2010 to 33 August 2014. Camera traps placed on elephant trails into farmland captured 34 elephants on 336 occasions over the four-year study period. We successfully 35 identified individual elephants from camera trap images for 126 of these occasions. 36All individuals detected on the camera traps were independent males, and we 37 identified 48 unique bulls aged between 10 and 29 years. Two-thirds of the bulls 38 identified were detected only once by camera traps over the study period, a pattern 39 that also held during the last year of study when camera trapping effort was 40 continuous. Our findings are consistent with previous studies that found that adult 41 males are more likely to adopt high-risk feeding behaviours such as crop foraging, 42 though young males dispersing from maternal family units also consume crops in 43 Udzungwa. Our study found a large number of occasional crop-users (32 of the 48 44 bulls identified) and a smaller number of repeat crop-users (16 out of 48), suggesting 45 that lethal elimination of crop-using elephants is unlikely to be an effective long-term 46 strategy for reducing crop losses from elephants. 47 48

Management strategy evaluation (MSE) is a powerful tool for simulating all key aspects of natural resource management under conditions of uncertainty. We present the r package generalised management strategy evaluation (GMSE), which applies genetic algorithms to provide a generalised tool for simulating adaptive decision‐making management scenarios between stakeholders with competing objectives under complex social‐ecological interactions and uncertainty. GMSE models can be agent‐based and spatially explicit, incorporating a high degree of realism through mechanistic modelling of links and feedbacks among stakeholders and with the ecosystem; additionally, user‐defined sub‐models can also be incorporated as functions into the broader GMSE framework. We show how GMSE simulates a social‐ecological system using the example of an adaptively managed waterfowl population on an agricultural landscape; simulated waterfowl exploit agricultural land, causing conflict between conservation interests and the interest of food producers maximising their crop yield. The r package GMSE is open source under GNU Public License; source code and documents are freely available on GitHub.

Crop loss to foraging elephants is one of the most significant causes of conflict between people and elephants in areas where wild elephants share resources with people. Effective solutions to reduce the effects of human-elephant conflict on local livelihoods are thus essential to foster coexistence between elephants and people. We assessed the effectiveness of chilli-briquettes (bricks made of dry chilli, elephant dung and water) in altering elephants use of space in the eastern Okavango Panhandle, Botswana. We burned .  briquettes during the night over a -month period to test five treatments: frequent burning of () chilli and () chilli-free briquettes, occasional burning of () chilli and () chilli-free briquettes, and () a control treatment. Using camera traps and footprint surveys we assessed the number of elephants that used experimental sites, and the times at which they did so. We found elephants changed their movement behaviour from predominantly nocturnal to diurnal in areas where chilli-briquettes were burned throughout the night; however, there was no difference in the mean numbers of individuals between treatments with and without chillies. In other words, chilli-briquettes had a repellent but not a deterrent effect on elephants, keeping them away only at times when chilli-briquettes were smouldering. Based on these findings we recommend the use of chilli-briquettes as a method to deter elephants in the short term. In the long term, chilli-briquettes should be applied in combination with other larger-scale mitigation approaches, such as land management and cooperative community-based tools.