Multidisciplinary engagement for fencing research informs efficacy and rancher-to-researcher knowledge exchange

Across much of the Western United States, recovery of large carnivore populations is creating new challenges for livestock producers. Reducing the risks of sharing the landscape with recovering wildlife populations is critical to private working lands, which play an vital role in securing future energy, water, food, and fiber for an ever-expanding human population. Fencing is an important mitigation practice that many ranchers, land managers, and conservationists implement to reduce carnivore-livestock conflict. While fencing strategies have been reviewed in the literature, research seldom incorporates knowledge from the people who utilize fencing the most (i.e., livestock producers). Incorporating producers and practitioners early in the process of producing scientific knowledge is proving to be a critical endeavor for enhancing knowledge exchange, better evaluation of the practice, and more realistic understanding of the costs and benefits. Here, we describe how our multidisciplinary effort of co-producing knowledge informs understanding of the effectiveness of various fencing designs and more importantly provides a better mechanism for transferring this knowledge between producers, researchers, and land managers. We explain the process underway and demonstrate that incorporating producers and practitioners from the onset allows research priorities and expected outcomes to be set collaboratively, gives transparency to the agricultural community of the research process, provides a critical lens to evaluate efficacy and functionality, and will inform the practicality of fencing as a conflict prevention tool. We discuss opportunities and challenges of this co-production process and how it can be applied to other realms of fencing and conflict prevention strategies.

Defining practical and robust study designs for interventions targeted at terrestrial mammalian predators

Conflicts between humans and mammalian predators are globally widespread and increasing, creating a long-lasting challenge for conservation and local livelihoods. Protection interventions, which are essential to conflict mitigation, should be based on solid evidence of effectiveness produced by robust study designs. Yet, it is unclear what study designs have been used in predator-targeted interventions and how they can be improved to provide best practices for replications. I examined how applications of five study designs (before-after, before-after-control-impact, control-impact, crossover [i.e., the same randomly assigned study units acting as treatments and controls during alternating trials], and randomized controlled trial) have changed over time and how these changes are related to authors, predator species, countries, and intervention types (aversion, husbandry, mixed interventions, invasive management, lethal control, and noninvasive management). I applied multinomial regression modeling to 434 cases (28 predator species and 45 countries) from 244 studies published from 1955 to 2020. Study design was related only to intervention type. Less reliable before-after and control-impact studies were the most common (47.7% and 38.2% of cases, respectively), and their use increased over years as did all interventions. The contribution of the most robust before-after-control-impact (7.4%), randomized controlled trial (5.3%), and crossover designs (1.4%) remained minor over time. Crossover is suitable for aversion, most husbandry techniques, and a few other interventions, but crossover interventions also have the most limitations in terms of applicability. Randomized controlled trial is generally applicable, but impractical or inappropriate for some interventions, and before-after-control-impact appears to be the most widely applicable study design for predator-targeted interventions.

Coexistence Praxis: The Role of Resource Managers in Wolf-Livestock Interactions on Federal Lands

In resource management, new terms are frequently introduced, reflecting ongoing evolution in the theory and practice of ecology and governance. Yet understandings of what new concepts mean, for whom, and what they imply for management on the ground can vary widely. Coexistence—a prominent concept within the literature and practices around human-wildlife conflict and predator management—is one such term: widely invoked and yet poorly defined. While for some coexistence is the latest paradigm in improving human-wildlife relations, the concept remains debated and indeed even hotly contested by others—particularly on the multiple-use public lands of the American West, where gray wolf conservation, livestock production, and the claims of diverse stakeholders share space.

The multiple meanings of coexistence present serious challenges for conservation practice, as what the concept implies or requires can be contested by those most central to its implementation. In this study we examine wolf-livestock management—a classic case of human-wildlife conflict—by focusing on the experiences and perspectives of U.S. Forest Service (USFS) managers. We reviewed coexistence's multivalence in the literature, complementing semi-structured interviews conducted with USFS employees on case study forests from across the western states. Through this, we highlight the complexity and multi-dimensionality of the concept, and the unique yet under-explored perspective that resource managers bring to these debates.

This work draws on insights from political ecology to emphasize the situatedness of manager practice—taking place within a broader set of relations and contextual pressures—while extending political ecologists' traditional focus on the resource user to a concern with the resource manager as a key actor in environmental conflicts. Through our engagement with the experiences and perceptions of USFS managers, who must balance conservation aims with long-established land uses like livestock grazing, we hope to clarify the various dimensions of coexistence. Our hope is that this work thus increases the possibility for empathy and collaboration among managers and stakeholders engaged in this complex socio-ecological challenge.

Setting Statistical Thresholds Is Useful to Define Truly Effective Conservation Interventions

Effective interventions are needed to solve conflicts between humans and predators over livestock killing, nuisance behavior, and attacks on pets and humans. Progress in quantification of evidence-based effectiveness and selection of the best interventions raises new questions, such as the existence of thresholds to identify truly effective interventions. Current classification of more and less effective interventions is subjective and statistically unjustified. This study describes a novel method to differentiate true and untrue effectiveness on a basis of false positive risk (FPR). I have collected 152 cases of applications of damage-reducing interventions from 102 scientific publications, 26 countries, 22 predator species, and 6 categories of interventions. The analysis has shown that the 95% confidence interval of the relative risk of predator-caused damage was 0.10–0.25 for true effectiveness (FPR < 0.05) and 0.35–0.56 for untrue effectiveness (FPR ≥ 0.05). This means that damage was reduced by 75–90% for truly effective interventions and by 44–65% for interventions of untrue effectiveness. Based on this, it was specified that truly effective interventions have the relative risk ≤ 0.25 (damage reduction ≥ 75%) and the effectiveness of interventions with the relative risk > 0.25 (damage reduction < 75%) is untrue. This threshold is statistically well-justified, stable, easy to remember, and practical to use in anti-predator interventions. More research is essential to know how this threshold holds true for other conservation interventions aiming to reduce negative outcomes (e.g., poaching rates) or increase positive outcomes (e.g., species richness).

Variation and conservation implications of the effectiveness of anti-bear interventions

Human-bear conflicts triggered by nuisance behaviour in public places and damage to livestock, crops, beehives and trees are among the main threats to bear populations globally. The effectiveness of interventions used to minimize bear-caused damage is insufficiently known and comparative reviews are lacking. We conducted a meta-analysis of 77 cases from 48 publications and used the relative risk of damage to compare the effectiveness of non-invasive interventions, invasive management (translocations) and lethal control (shooting) against bears. We show that the most effective interventions are electric fences (95% confidence interval = 79.2–100% reduction in damage), calving control (100%) and livestock replacement (99.8%), but the latter two approaches were applied in only one case each and need more testing. Deterrents varied widely in their effectiveness (13.7–79.5%) and we recommend applying these during the peak periods of damage infliction. We found shooting (− 34.2 to 100%) to have a short-term positive effect with its effectiveness decreasing significantly and linearly over time. We did not find relationships between bear density and intervention effectiveness, possibly due to differences in spatial scales at which they were measured (large scales for densities and local fine scales for effectiveness). We appeal for more effectiveness studies and their scientific publishing in regard to under-represented conflict species and regions.