Coupled human and natural systems approach to wildlife research and conservation

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Conserving wildlife while simultaneously meeting the resource needs of a growing human population is a major sustainability challenge. As such, using combined social and environmental perspectives to understand how people and wildlife are interlinked, together with the mechanisms that may weaken or strengthen those linkages, is of utmost importance. However, such integrated information is lacking. To help fill this information gap, we describe an integrated coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) approach for analyzing the patterns, causes, and consequences of changes in wildlife population and habitat, human population and land use, and their interactions. Using this approach, we synthesize research in two sites, Wolong Nature Reserve in China and Chitwan National Park in Nepal, to explicate key relationships between people and two globally endangered wildlife conservation icons, the giant panda and the Bengal tiger. This synthesis reveals that local resident characteristics such as household socioeconomics and demography, as well as community-level attributes such as resource management organizations, affect wildlife and their habitats in complex and even countervailing ways. Human impacts on wildlife and their habitats are in turn modifying the suite of ecosystem services that they provide to local residents in both sites, including access to forest products and cultural values. These interactions are further complicated by human and natural disturbance (e.g., civil wars, earthquakes), feedbacks (including policies), and telecouplings (socioeconomic and environmental interactions over distances) that increasingly link the focal systems with other distant systems. We highlight several important implications of using a CHANS approach for wildlife research and conservation that is useful not only in China and Nepal but in many other places around the world facing similar challenges.

Integration across a metacoupled world

“…Although the telecoupling framework is relatively new , it has been applied to address many different issues, such as trade (of food, energy, sand, forest products, industrial products, and virtual water; Liu 2014, Wicke 2014, Liu et al 2015a,b, Silva et al 2017, land use and land cover change (Eakin et al 2014, Sun et al 2017, species invasion , species migration (Hulina et al 2017), tourism (Liu et al 2015a), water transfer (Deines et al 2016, urbanization (Fang and Ren 2017), wildlife transfer (Liu et al 2015a), foreign direct investment (McKinney 2014), payment for ecosystem services Yang 2013, Liu et al 2016a), knowledge transfer (Liu et al 2015a), conservation (Carter et al 2014, Gasparri et al 2016, Wang and Liu 2017, economic development , and fisheries (Lynch andLiu 2014, Carlson et al 2017).…”

Application of a coupled human natural system framework to organize and frame challenges and opportunities for biodiversity conservation on private lands.

“…1) helps understand institutions and actors that play a role in biodiversity conservation on private lands (e.g., Turner et al 2003, Carter et al 2014. However, as shown above, subsystems do not work in isolation and just describing systems is insufficient to understand conservation opportunities and costs.…”

“…More closely aligned with a discussion of private lands, Strohbach et al (2014) present urban wildlife conservation as an example of CHANS. Likewise, in a recent special issue on CHANS in this journal, Carter et al (2014) discuss a CHANS approach to wildlife conservation, highlighting its value for linking different disciplines and leading to identification of new relationships and feedbacks that may not have been identified in previous analyses. Additionally, they discuss the value of considering relationships between people and biodiversity (or wildlife) across scales.…”

“…Applications of CHANS to biodiversity conservation, particularly the recent comparable case studies (e.g., Carter et al 2014), focus largely on publicly protected land designated for conservation by government authorities, e.g., national parks or scientific reserves. Although a critical element of conservation efforts, these publicly protected lands are limited to 14.8% of global terrestrial area and 13.8% in the United States (World Bank 2015).…”

Climate change, cattle, and the challenge of sustainability in a telecoupled system in Africa

“…The changing flows are increasingly connecting socioeconomic and ecological systems that are distant from each other through various human-environment interactions (Liu et al 2016). Given these increasing interactions over distances, examining coupled systems in isolation overlooks crucial dynamics and limits the ability of researchers to predict changes in the future (Carter et al 2014). For example, the flow of information and technology from traders in Vietnam and China caused unanticipated changes in the hunting behaviors of people living near a protected area in Cambodia (Carter et al 2017).…”