International guidelines recommend the integration of local communities within protected areas management as a means to improve conservation efforts. However, local management plans rarely consider communities knowledge about wildlife and their traditions to promote biodiversity conservation. In the Sebitoli area of Kibale National Park, Uganda, the contact of local communities with wildlife has been strictly limited at least since the establishment of the park in 1993. The park has not develop programs, outside of touristic sites, to promote local traditions, knowledge, and beliefs in order to link neighboring community members to nature. To investigate such links, we used a combination of semidirected interviews and participative observations (N= 31) with three communities. While human and wildlife territories are legally disjointed, results show that traditional wildlife and spiritual related knowledge trespasses them and the contact with nature is maintained though practice, culture, and imagination. More than 66% of the people we interviewed have wild animals as totems, and continue to use plants to medicate, cook, or build. Five spirits structure humanwildlife relationships at specific sacred sites. However, this knowledge varies as a function of the location of local communities and the sacred sites. A better integration of local wildlifefriendly knowledge into management plans may revive communities' connectedness to nature, motivate conservation behaviors, and promote biodiversity conservation.
Key MessagesThis paper explores whether traditional crisis mapping systems can be used to tackle the perennial livelihood problem of elephant raiding around Kibale National Park, Uganda.The goal of the system described in this paper is to streamline the process of reporting elephant raiding to forest officials so that park services can be effectively deployed.The challenges and considerations of deploying such a system in an environment where ICT resources are sparse are described.Dwindling animal habitat and burgeoning human settlements have made managing human-animal conflict a critical problem in conservation of protected areas, particularly in the biodiversity-rich tropics. In this paper, we present a system aimed at leveraging public participation from affected communities to help effectively manage the conflict in both the short and long term. However, deploying a system that depends on volunteered information has its challenges in the unique settings of a national park where Information Communication Technologies infrastructure is sparse. The specific requirements of the system being easy to use and having automatic geocoding, coupled with the lack of internet access, made it impossible to deploy traditional crisis mapping software such as Ushahidi. We highlight the unique challenges of deploying a system that relies on volunteered information for managing human-animal conflict in a technology resource sparse environment and how the challenges were surpassed. Our system aims at streamlining the process of reporting cases of elephant raiding to the forest officials so as to elicit quick support. The long-term aim is to use the data collected through the system for spatio-temporal analysis to better understand elephant raiding patterns so that the parks services can be effectively deployed.
Parks are essential to protect biodiversity and finding ways to improve park effectiveness is a topic of importance. We contributed to this debate by examining spatial and temporal changes in illegal activities in Kibale National Park, Uganda between 2006-2016 and use existing data to evaluate how changes were correlated with the living conditions of people in neighboring communities and patrolling effort. We explore the effectiveness of conservation strategies implemented in Kibale, by quantifying changes in the abundance of nine animal species over two to five decades. While uncertainty in such animal survey data is inherently large and it is hard to generalize across a 795 km 2 area that encompases diverse habitat types, data suggest an increase in animal abundance in the National Park. An increase in patroling effort by park guards over the decade was correlated with a decline in the number of traps and snares found, which suggests patrolling helped limit resource extraction from the park. The park's edge was extensively used for illegal forest product extraction, while the setting of snares occurred more often deeper in the forest. Perhaps counter-intuitively, increased community wealth or park related employment in a village next to the park, were positively correlated with increased illegal forest product extraction. Overall, our results suggests that the portfolio of conservation strategies used over the last two to five decades were effective for protecting the park and its animals, though understanding the impact of these efforts on local human populations and how to mitigate any losses and suffering they sustain remains an important area of research and action. It is evident that complex social, political, and economical drivers impact conservation success and more inter-disciplinary studies are required to quantify and qualify these dimensions.
It is widely viewed that by providing employment or services to neighbouring communities, a protected area may increase positive attitudes towards conservation and discourage encroachment, but this is rarely tested. Our research examines this view by evaluating local attitudes towards the park and incidence of encroachment before and after the implementation of a novel conservation strategy -a mobile health clinic -in the predominantly agricultural communities bordering Kibale National Park, Uganda. The implementation of the mobile clinic programme coincided with a more positive attitude towards the park and a decrease in the number of people who 'disliked' the park. Despite this, the incidence of encroachment increased. There are a number of possible explanations for this contradiction, including respondents giving answers they believe will maintain the service they appreciate, and that while the local community may appreciate the mobile clinic, this appreciation is not sufficient to make people alter their behaviour because of tradition or need (e.g., the need among the very poor to feed their family or send a child to school is very high). Overall, people typically expressed that they did not have a problem with living adjacent to the park, except for the harm done by crop-raiding animals. However, local people expressed the view that they receive few benefits from the park -a perception that might be improved with more extensive use of the mobile clinic.
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