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Research Day Entry

Humans and the Environment: Exploring Human-Wildlife Conflict through social and ecological costs in the Makgadikgadi region of Botswana

The ability of an animal to move across a landscape for resources and dispersal has become increasingly more difficult as geographic and anthropogenic fragmentation through climate change and human growth continue to expand. Modelling landscape use and wildlife corridors are important components to alleviating this stress as well as maintaining those connections between regional populations. Wildlife, in particular predators, must navigate through these human-dominated landscapes to find resources, leading to higher numbers of human-wildlife conflict (HWC). In most of today’s landscape connectivity projects, ecologists use least-cost (LC) modelling to calculate an explicit ecological path using least cost distance. Currently, quantitative corridor and predictive modelling revolves around habitat quality, anthropogenic structures and movement data but does not examine the social costs, or benefits, placed on people living on the landscape. In order to understand HWC both the social and ecological risks and opportunities of a landscape must be considered. This presentation sets up the potential work and data to map the social and ecological landscape and discusses its theoretical implications for the future, particularly in regards to the connectivity of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and Makgadikgadi National Park.