How we can avoid human-animal conflicts

 

Co-adaptation is a helpful technique to ensure that our wildlife is able to adapt to human activities and vice versa. One example is buildings on stilts to make them inaccessible to elephants

The visual of an elephant with a tracking collar barging into the safety of a gated house and trampling a person has gone viral and has exposed the elephant in the room, both literally and metaphorically. Human casualties are the most extreme and unfortunate outcomes of shared spaces between people and wildlife. Apart from human deaths, the costs of injuries, crop losses, economic damages, and opportunity costs pose a huge burden for families who share space with wild animals. Yet, despite being the most populous country in the world, we are still among the most biodiverse. So how are we able to balance the livelihood and food security of 140 crore people with our biodiversity conservation goals? Perhaps the answer lies in co-adaptation between people and wildlife.

Co-adaptation refers to the idea of people and animals modifying their own behaviour to navigate the presence of one another. In India, people have historically co-adapted with wildlife through various mechanisms, be it cultural, behavioural or societal. For instance, species such as elephants, tigers, snakes, and even crocodiles are an intricate part of our folklore, culture, and religion. Species such as leopards, wild pigs, and elephants have adapted to human-modified landscapes through anthropogenic food, shared habitats and/or learning to navigate human activities. For instance, despite the high pressures of development and land-use change, India still harbours 65 per cent of all wild Asian elephants with 75-80 per cent of their range being outside our national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.

While human co-adaptation techniques have been largely successful historically, we reduced our dependency on such practices because elephants and leopards were hunted until they were on the brink of extinction prior to the enactment of the Indian Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972. Now, due to successful conservation efforts, we may be able to adopt our earlier practices to prevent damages to life and property. For instance, buildings near the forests of north-eastern India were erected on stilts to serve the dual purpose to making them flood proof and to make them inaccessible to elephants. Over time, this was replaced by structures on the ground level that were easily exploited by elephants to access stored food. Crop losses in some areas were negotiated through beliefs that such losses are a blessing from gods and would promise a better harvest next year. The choice of crops was made such that it did not attract elephants. Either that, or local groups were mobilised to stand guard over crops like paddy during the harvest season. These measure were undertaken because wildlife species do not understand human-made boundaries and stop-gap solutions like unplanned capture-translocations are often counterproductive, like with the male elephant in Wayanad.

Kerala’s Wayanad and Idduki districts were in the news for a few human-animal conflicts — elephant swallowing a food bomb, damage to crops and property, and in the most extreme case, loss of human lives. The geographical location of Wayanad, surrounded by Protected Areas predisposes the region for a high overlap between people and wildlife such as elephants and tigers. Hence, proactive measures are required to prevent negative impacts of these species on people and vice-versa. Monitoring individual elephants for their behaviour is vital to preempt negative encounters. If a certain elephant regularly displays behaviour that may jeopardise human life, such animals need to be removed from that area. Management decisions such as monitoring, deterring, or capturing need to be based on individual animal behaviour and physiological condition (musth status for instance). Regular monitoring of elephants in Gudalur, for instance has highlighted that only a small proportion of them pose a threat to people even as the entire population often takes the blame.

Furthermore, data systems based on the analysis of trends and circumstances of negative encounters between people and elephants must be put in place to identify vulnerable groups of people and vulnerable locations. Once these facets have been identified, locally relevant and acceptable measures need to be put in place to prevent damage. The next important step would be to promote coordination between Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala with respect to sharing information on animal movement and real-time data on human casualties and economic losses. Joint operations and training for the forest departments would likely yield positive results to this end.

The media too plays a crucial role shaping public perception towards wildlife. While reports on damage due to conflicts feature prominently, news of co-adaptation between people and wildlife that results in more frequent but less intense interactions fail to garner attention and hence, is often ignored by people. Media can play a positive and proactive role in dissipating information in safer shared spaces on ways to minimise damage, as highlighted by the positive engagement between media personnel, forest department, local communities and conservation agencies in Mumbai, a city that shares its space with leopards. Other local stakeholders, be it local civil society groups or district administration can play pivotal roles in the management of negative interactions between people and wildlife. Sharing safety protocols, fast-tracking the installation of street lights and toilets and implementing early warning measures like public communication systems can help avert unfortunate incidents that jeopardise human lives and livelihoods. Overall, managing conflicts with wild animals needs a concerted and cross-sectoral approach that equitably involves all sections of society to find shared solutions that balance human safety and ecological security.

Written by Aritra Kshettry

Source: Indian Express, 2/03/24

Indian Government’s 14 Guidelines to Address Human-Wildlife Conflict (HWC)

 Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) is a critical issue in India, where the coexistence of humans and wild animals is necessary. HWC is defined as the negative impact of the interaction between humans and wildlife on either or both parties. To address this issue, the Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Shri Bhupender Yadav released 14 guidelines to facilitate a common understanding among key stakeholders on what constitutes effective and efficient mitigation of HWC in India.

Species-specific guidelines

Ten species-specific guidelines for mitigating conflict with elephants, gaur, leopard, snake, crocodile, rhesus macaque, wild pig, bear, blue bull, and blackbuck were released. These guidelines will help develop site-specific HWC mitigation measures.

Cross-cutting issue guidelines

In addition, there are four guidelines on cross-cutting issues, including cooperation between the forest and media sector, occupational health and safety, crowd management, and addressing health emergencies.

Harmonious-coexistence approach

The guidelines aim to ensure the harmonious coexistence of humans and wild animals. They take into consideration the existing guidelines and advisories issued by various agencies and state forest departments, as well as good practices and experiences from the field.

Holistic approach

The guidelines provide a framework to take a holistic approach to address HWC. This includes addressing the drivers and pressures that lead to HWC, establishing and managing prevention methods, and reducing the impact of conflict on both humans and wild animals.

Participatory and inclusive approach

The development of the guidelines followed a participatory, inclusive, and integrated approach involving key relevant stakeholders and sectors, including agriculture, veterinary, disaster management, district administration, rural development and Panchayati Raj Institutions, NGOs, and media. Over 1600 participants were involved in 105 events, workshops, consultations, meetings, and field missions.

Living document

The set of guidelines is not static but rather a living document that will be reviewed every five years from 2023 onwards. Feedback from field practitioners and other wildlife experts will be analyzed to assess specific elements and sections that need to undergo changes.

Source: https://www.gktoday.in/topic/indian-governments-14-guidelines-to-address-human-wildlife-conflict-hwc/

How human disturbance can alter habitats, routines of animals

 Hours, minutes or even seconds can make the difference for an animal between stumbling upon a predator and avoiding one, between finding a bush loaded with berries and discovering branches that have already been gnawed bare. Mere moments can determine whether a raccoon comes face-to-face with a bobcat at night, whether a flock of cocky turkeys finds its field already occupied by cranes, whether a deer disappears into the trees before a coyote appears on the scene.

An animal’s fortunes, and the health of entire ecosystems, can hinge on these ephemeral encounters — or lucky non-encounters. “An animal must be at the right place, at the right time, to avoid predators, find food, reproduce successfully,” said Neil Gilbert, a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University. In that way, the interactions between the animals in a given ecosystem are like a theatrical production, he said, adding, “For the production to be a success, each actor has to be onstage, in the right place, and they must act and deliver their lines at the right time.” Now, a new study reveals how humans might unwittingly rewrite these ecological scripts, altering how the characters interact and fueling more interspecies encounters.

To conduct the study, Gilbert and his colleagues analyzed images captured by Snapshot Wisconsin, a citizen-science project run by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Since 2016, volunteers have deployed more than 2,000 wildlife cameras across the state, capturing tens of millions of images of Wisconsin’s fields, farms and forests — and the fauna that frequent them.

Wild animals of different species were more likely to lead overlapping lives — appearing at local camera sites in quicker succession — in human-altered landscapes, like farms, than in more undisturbed locations, such as national forests, scientists reported in PNAS last month.

The finding suggests that human disturbance can squeeze animals closer together, increasing the odds that they bump into each other. “There’s a little less elbow room,” Gilbert said.

Although more research is needed, that interspecies squeeze could have effects such as making it harder for prey to evade predators, intensifying competition for resources or increasing the risk of interspecies disease transmission, the researchers say.

“The compression of species niches will likely lead to new interactions among species with unknown consequences,” Benjamin Zuckerberg, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an author of the study, said in an email.

Strangers on a Plain

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources created Snapshot Wisconsin in an effort to collect continuous, statewide data — at all hours of the day and during all seasons of the year — on local wild animal populations. It relies on an army of volunteer camera hosts to install, monitor and maintain wildlife cameras, on both public and private land across the state.

The cameras, which are triggered by motion and body heat, have captured a menagerie of animals going about their everyday lives: bald eagles scavenging in the snow, bear cubs climbing trees, a newborn fawn, a bevy of otters gamboling down a grassy trail. “It’s just so many otters,” said Jennifer Stenglein, a quantitative research scientist at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and an author of the new study.

(The department posts many of the photos on Zooniverse, an online citizen science platform, where volunteers from around the world can help identify the creatures in each shot.)

For the new study, the researchers analyzed nearly 800,000 photos of animals captured over the course of four years. To assess species “co-occurrence,” they calculated how much time elapsed between the moments when members of 74 species pairs — turkeys and deer, for instance, or coyotes and skunks — appeared at a given camera site.

If coyotes and skunks are routinely showing up in the same place within an hour or a day of one another, they are more likely to have habitats and routines that overlap — and to encounter one another in the real world — than if days or weeks pass between appearances, the scientists reasoned. The time intervals between detections varied enormously. Sometimes the cameras captured the odd animal couples in the same frame; other times, days or weeks might pass between their appearances.

But overall, across all animal pairs, the trend was clear: In relatively pristine habitats, such as national forests, roughly six days elapsed, on average, between detections. In the most human-altered habitats, that interval dropped to an average of four days. Over a three-month period, the researchers estimated, highly antagonistic pairs — that is, duos in which one species was likely to kill the other, such as bobcats and rabbits or foxes and squirrels — would encounter each other seven additional times in the most highly disturbed landscapes compared with the least disturbed ones.

(Even when the animals do not come face-to-face, simply hearing or smelling a predator can have “dramatic effects” on the behaviors of prey species, Gilbert noted.)

“It will be fascinating to see who will be the winners and who will be the losers in this human-compressed niche space,” Zuckerberg said.

“For example, will prey and lesser competitors need to adapt new defenses or behaviors?” he wondered. Can they even do so?

The scientists also found that much of the effect appeared to be driven by differences in relative abundance; species such as raccoons and squirrels tended to be more numerous in human-disturbed landscapes — where dumpsters overflow and fields are thick with grain — than in wilder ones.

But these differences did not entirely account for the findings, suggesting that some species might also change their behavior in human-altered habitats, becoming active at different times of day or ranging less widely. (Animals with less space to roam would be more likely to collide, like gas particles in a shrinking vessel, Gilbert noted.)

Still, many questions remain, including whether the findings generalize to other species and ecosystems and what, precisely, is happening when these creatures meet, even when the encounters are caught on camera.

How did the bobcat chase off the coyote? Who won the skunk-raccoon faceoff? And why does that deer look as if it’s about to kick a snarling opossum in the face? (“Like, what did this poor opossum do?” Gilbert wondered.)

More broadly, are species like deer and raccoons actually engaging with one another when they meet on a dark trail? Or are they simply passing by, like sentient ships in the night? “It is difficult to fully tease apart,” Zuckerberg said.

But the study illustrates the potential for using wildlife cameras to probe aspects of animal behavior that might otherwise be difficult to observe, Stenglein said. “We didn’t sit in the field and watch animals interact,” she said. “But there’s so much power in being able to use this trail camera data to understand how animals are behaving. It just, to me, opens up a floodgate of possibilities.”

(Written by Emily Anthes)

Source: Indian Express, 18/01/23

Can elephant collaring help manage human-elephant conflict in Assam?

 

Assam's forest department is planning to collar at least five elephants in high-conflict habitats in the coming months. What is radio-collaring, what are the challenges involved, and can it really help?

Last week, a wild elephant was radio-collared for the first time in Assam’s Sonitpur district by the state’s Forest Department, in collaboration with NGO World Wildlife Fund (WWF)-India. The joint initiative is being described as a step to study and mitigate human-elephant conflict in the state. Experts say the exercise is challenging, and even runs the risk of having a low success rate. Yet, the forest department is planning to collar at least five elephants in high-conflict habitats in the coming months. What is radio-collaring, what are the challenges involved, and can it really help?

What are radio-collars?

Radio collars are GPS-enabled collars that can relay information about an elephants’ whereabouts. They weigh roughly 8 kg and are fitted around the elephant’s neck. According to a WWF blog, collaring includes identifying a suitable candidate (generally an adult elephant), darting it with a sedative, and fitting a collar around the elephant’s neck, before the animal is revived.

Additionally, the team also attaches an accelerometer to the collar to “understand what exactly an elephant is doing at any given time (running, walking, eating, drinking, etc)”.

How does radio-collaring help?

The objectives are twofold, M K Yadava, Chief Wildlife Warden, Assam said. “Information from the GPS would help us track and study the movement patterns of the herd, across regions and habitats,” he said. Added Hiten Baishya of the WWF, “We will know where they are moving, which corridors they frequent, if the habitat is sufficient, if it needs protection, etc.” This would help in understanding what is driving the conflict.

The second objective is incidental, said Yadava. The collars would serve as an early warning system, and if people know which direction an elephant is moving, they can prepare accordingly. “Villagers and forest officials will know about approaching elephants… very much how weather forecasting works. And this would help mitigate conflict incidents,” said veterinarian and elephant expert Kushal Konwar Sharma, who is involved in the exercise.

However, the main objective is long-term study of movement patterns, says experts. “Gradually, as habitats are shrinking and traditional corridors are not in use anymore, it is imperative to study the range of travels and make an inventory of the new habitats. This is where collaring can come in,” said ano

What is the plan in Assam?

In March 2020, the Ministry of Environment of Forest & Climate Change, gave approval to collar five elephants in Sonitpur and Biswanath districts in Assam, stating a number of conditions, among them being “minimum trauma” to the elephants during the operation and submission of regular periodic reports.

Yadava said the department aimed at collaring eleven elephants across the landscape in the future. “We have eleven elephant herds to be tracked in high human elephant-conflict areas. These include areas in Sonitpur, Golaghat, Nagaon, Goalpara, Udalguri, among others,” he said. He added that there was no time frame involved since this was such a “delicate and complicated” exercise.

Is it easy collaring an elephant?

Not at all. Experts say it is an extremely time-consuming and challenging exercise. “We first have to identify the matriarch of the herd we will tag… identification alone takes time and involves us stalking them for days,” said the elephant expert Sarma, adding that there were “practical challenges” in tagging them too.

“We don’t have helicopters and other sophisticated equipment to approach elephants to tranquillise them. We go by foot. There is risk — for both our life and the elephant’s life. But we have very skilled experts on board and they are doing the job with utmost care,” added Baishya. When the approval comes from the Centre, we take into account all the conditions and follow them all, he added.ther forest department official, requesting anonymity.

Any other challenges/drawbacks?

Officials said all components for radio collaring are not available in India, including collars and tranquilising drugs. These have to be imported and are quite expensive.

Baishya said they also have to take into account that elephants grow in size. “Collars may become tight, so we usually take a senior elephant so there is less chance of growth,” he said.

The state’s topography too, marked by hills and rivers, including the Brahmaputra that runs across it, can be a challenge. “Each state has its own peculiar problems. We have elephants that are long ranging, and have a diverse topography,” said Yadava.

“Many times elephants are not able to keep the collar on. They will have it on for maximum six months, before it falls off,” said Bibhuti Lahkar, a senior scientist with Guwhati-based conservation NGO Aaranyak. He added that there may be technical glitches with the device too.

In Assam, too, an elephant who had strayed from the Amchang Wildlife Sanctuary, that borders Guwahati, into the city in 2019, was radio-collared on a trial basis last year. “We monitored it for a month, but due to the weight of the belt and elephant brushing against trees, the signal was feeble and ultimately the collar fell off,” said a forest official, who did not want to be named.

So is it worth it?

Yadava added that while there were risks and the success rate was low, there has been no better mechanism (other than collaring) to study conflict long term.

Lahkar said that in Africa, such an exercise had worked well.

“Of course, the terrain is different here and may prove to be more difficult, but it is worth doing it,” he said, adding that if it works well, and if even six out of ten elephants are collared, it would yield “lots of information”.

Collaring has been attempted in Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Tamil Nadu too.

How bad is human-elephant conflict in Assam?

From 2010-2019, 761 people and 249 elephants were killed in Assam as a direct consequence of human-elephant conflict, stated the WWF blog.

“More than 65 per cent of the habitat north of the river has been lost in the past few decades to agriculture and settlements, and conflict between humans and elephants has been steadily increasing ever since,” it said.

Yadava said there are currently about 6,000 wild elephants in Assam.

Source: Indian Express, 24/11/21