Staging behaviours identify spatial and temporal risk of human‐wildlife conflict

Abstract

1. Habitat conversion to farmland has increased human-wildlife interactions, which often lead to conflict, injury or death for people and animals. Understanding the behavioural and landscape drivers of human-wildlife conflict is critical for managing wildlife populations. Staging behaviour prior to crop incursions has been described across multiple taxa and offers potential utility in managing conflict, but few quantitative assessments of staging have been undertaken. Animal movement data can provide valuable, fine-scale information on such behaviour with opportunities for application to real-time management for conflict prediction.2. We developed an approach to assess the efficacy of six widely used metrics of animal movement to identify staging behaviour prior to agricultural incursions.We applied this approach to GPS data from 55 African elephants in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem and found tortuosity and HMM-derived behavioural states to be the most effective for identifying staging events. We then assessed temporal patterns of defined staging at daily and seasonal scales and explored environmental and anthropogenic drivers of staging from spatial generalized logistic mixed models. Finally, we tested the viability of combining movement and simple spatial metrics to predict crop incursions based on GPS data.3. Our approach identified staging behaviour that appeared to be driven largely by human activity and diurnal availability of protective cover from forest, riverine vegetation, and topography. Staging also varied substantially by season.Tortuosity and behavioural state metrics identified different staging strategies with distinct spatial distributions and anthropogenic drivers, and appeared to be linked to the juxtaposition between protected and cultivated lands. Tortuositybased staging combined with distance-to-agriculture produced promising results for pre-event prediction of crop incursion.

Crop use structures resource selection strategies for African elephants in a human‐dominated landscape

“…This suggests that a softer edge between natural and cultivated land can allow elephants to move further into unprotected areas and in turn shift the spatial distribution of conflict risk to farms further from protected areas. The importance of forest patches to this movement behavior also aligns with previous work showing that elephants and other species rely on extant forest to access crops and limit detection from humans (Hahn et al., 2023 ; Tiller, 2017 ).…”

“…Conflict hotspots occur in areas with lower densities of human settlements (Denninger‐Snyder et al., 2019 ), and elephants may also use landscape features such as forest patches and drainages to access crops (Pittiglio et al., 2014 ; Tiller, 2017 ). However, conflict hotspots are not necessarily predictive of general elephant space use (Pozo et al., 2018 ) and elephants have been shown to change foraging strategies to track crop brown‐down (Branco et al., 2019 ) and shift their ranges closer to crops when raiding (Hahn et al., 2023 ). Resource selection studies that can link crop use to overall foraging strategies, seasonal factors, and sex would be valuable to understand how conflict is influenced by behavioral and landscape factors, but this approach has been underserved (Mumby & Plotnik, 2018 ).…”