No abstract

Understanding the local communities' attitudes toward protected areas (PAs) is critical to PA management planning. However, what socio‐economic and demographic factors drive their attitude remains poorly studied. We interviewed 135 residents in three villages in the buffer zone of Bardia National Park, Nepal, to assess their perceived benefits and costs of the PA. We found that perceived benefits are skewed toward wealthy and influential people, whereas costs associated with wildlife‐caused damage (i.e., crop raiding) are borne disproportionately by poor people. The Tobit regression model showed that wealthy and educated residents who obtained direct tourism benefits from the park were significantly more likely to hold positive attitudes toward the PA. On the flip side, residents who had experienced conflict with park administration (park staff and military guards) and incurred a higher amount of crop loss in the recent past were likely to have negative attitudes. Our results showed that negative attitudes largely stemmed from park staff and military guards' behavior and inefficient service delivery from the national park office. In light of these findings, we suggest the park administration develop mechanisms to ensure efficient service delivery and pragmatic handling of community grievances concerning law enforcement and wildlife damage compensation. We also recommend directing park benefits to less educated and poor households and those suffering property losses from wildlife to improve park‐people relationships.

No abstract

A primary means of conserving a species or a habitat in a human‐dominated landscape is through promoting coexistence with humans while minimizing conflict. For this, we should understand how wildlife is impacted by direct and indirect human activities. Such information is rare in areas with high human densities. To investigate how animals respond to altered ecological conditions in human‐dominated landscapes, we focused on a wild herbivore of conservation concern in the Krishnasaar Conservation Area (KrCA) in Nepal. Here, blackbuck Antilope cervicapra , a generalist grazer, lives in refugia located with a growing human population. We studied the impacts of humans on habitat use and behavior of blackbuck. We laid 250 × 250 m grid cells in the entire KrCA and carried out indirect sign surveys with three replications for habitat use assessment. We observed herds of blackbuck for 89 h in different habitat types using scan sampling methods. Our habitat‐use survey showed that habitats under intensive human use were hardly used by blackbuck, even when high‐quality forage was available. Habitat openness was the major predictor of habitat use inside the core area, where levels of human activities were low. We also found a positive correlation between habitat use by blackbuck and livestock. Blackbuck were substantially more vigilant when they were in forest than in grassland, again indicating an influence of risk. Overall, blackbuck appear to be sensitive to the risk associated with both natural and anthropogenic factors. Our findings have direct implications for managing human–wildlife interactions in this landscape, specifically regarding strategies for livestock grazing in habitats highly used by blackbuck and concerning predictions of how changing land use will impact the long‐term persistence of blackbuck. Our work suggests that wild herbivores may be able to persist in landscapes with high human densities so long as there are refuges where human activities are relatively low.

The only means of conserving a species or a habitat in a human-dominated landscape is through promoting coexistence while minimizing conflict. To achieve this, it is vital to understand how wildlife are impacted by direct and indirect human activities. Such information is relatively rare from areas with high human densities. To investigate how animals respond to altered ecological conditions in human-dominated landscapes, we focussed on a wild herbivore of conservation concern in Krishnasaar Conservation Area (KrCA) in Nepal. Here, blackbuck Anticope cervicapra, a generalist grazer, lives in refugia located in a growing human population. We studied the impacts of humans on habitat-use and behaviour of blackbuck. We laid 250 x 250 m grid cells in the entire KrCA and carried out indirect sign surveys with three replications for habitat-use assessment. We observed herds of blackbuck for 89 hours in different possible habitat types, location and time of the day using scan sampling methods. Our habitat-use survey showed that habitats under intensive human use were hardly used by blackbuck, even when high-quality forage was available. In areas with low levels of human activity, natural risk factors, primarily habitat openness, was the major predictor of habitat-use. Interestingly, livestock presence positively influenced habitat-use by blackbuck. Blackbuck were substantially more vigilant when they were in forest than in grassland, again indicating an influence of risk. Overall, blackbuck appear to be sensitive to risk associated with both natural and anthropogenic factors. Our findings have direct implications for managing human-wildlife interactions in this landscape, specifically regarding strategies for livestock grazing in habitats highly used by blackbuck and concerning predictions of how changing land-use will impact long-term persistence of blackbuck. Our work suggests that wild herbivores may be able to persist in landscapes with high human densities so long as there are refuges where levels of human activity are relatively low.

Reducing crop damage caused by wildlife in forest-agricultural land interface requires an understanding of the spatial pattern of crop field use and its drivers. We assessed factors influencing the spatial pattern of crop-field use by a generalist wild herbivore, blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra), in the agriculture-dominated landscape of Krishnasaar Conservation Area (KrCA) in low land Nepal. We systematically selected 103 crop fields distributed over the entire KrCA (within both core area and community development zone) and surveyed them three times over three months, resulting in 309 sampling occasions. We found that crop use by blackbuck was highly localized inside core area (only 15% of the sampled crop fields were used) even though crop fields outside the core area were accessible and had limited mitigation measures applied. The linear mixed effect modeling showed that probability of crop field use by blackbuck increased with size of the crop field, implying the magnitude of foraging benefits affects blackbuck crop-use decisions. The presence of current mitigation measures (e.g., scare crow, vegetative fencing) did not have discernible influence on probability of crop field use, so did the types of the crops, and distance of crop fields from the center of the core area. Overall, our results suggest that generalist herbivore, blackbuck, employs low gain-low risk strategy when using crop fields in natural habitat-agricultural. Minimizing current level of crop damage by blackbuck will require working closely with farmers who owns lands close to the natural habitat (core area) to apply appropriate mitigation measures.