Completing the land-sharing strategy: reaching human-wildlife coexistence through alternative resource management

Abstract

The land-sharing strategy implies co-occurrence of human beings and wildlife, which frequently results in loss of life or injury to people, damage to crops and predation of livestock. Consequently, wildlife is persecuted in retaliation. The existence of contrasting interests such as food security through livestock production on the one hand, and the need to protect threatened species on the other, lay the foundations for human-wildlife conflict. After a decade of the introduction of "land-sharing" there is no formal analysis on the role of conflicts in the success of this strategy. This suggests that a review of the state of the art is necessary to identify gaps in the nature of human-wildlife conflicts in the framework of the strategy. To manage these conflicts, we must understand the underlying ecological basis of the predator's response to the choice of crops or livestock instead of their natural prey. The most frequent biological interaction that prevents coexistence is the predation livestock by carnivores and a factor that could explain it is the availability of natural prey. Predators choose the most profitable prey in relation to the cost and energy benefit incurred in the search and handling of prey. Therefore, if natural prey is scarce in relation to livestock, then livestock should be more profitable. Within this framework, I first determined that coexistence between humans and wildlife has not been considered a requirement for the viability of land-sharing/sparing approaches. Second, I determined under what conditions the availability of natural prey decreases livestock predation, the underlying biological impediment of human-carnivore coexistence, by using data from the literature around the globe. I found that wild prey availability increases livestock predation rate, but open vegetation is a more important predictor. Third, I empirically tested availability of wild prey as an explanatory factor of livestock predation through field observations by comparing rates of ovine predation by foxes on fields with varying wild and domestic prey availability. I found that higher occurrences of hare decrease ovine kill rate. Finally, I discuss framing food production landscapes in a social-ecological systems context and suggest viewing manageable variables of conflict resolution as system parameters that define states of coexistence to aid in swifter conflict resolution planning.