article · BMC Ecology
An investigation into coexistence between people and wildlife around Bale Mountains National Park examines the nature, drivers, and mitigations of ongoing conflicts. Encounters between local populations and wild animals profoundly affect communities, wildlife, and the surrounding environment through crop damage, livestock predation, habitat destruction, and retaliatory or defensive killings. The primary drivers identified are agricultural expansion, human settlement, deforestation, overgrazing by livestock, illegal grass collection, and poaching. To protect crops, farmers rely on guarding, live fencing, scarecrows, chasing, and smoking, while livestock predation is tackled mainly using fencing, chasing, scarecrows, and guarding. Mitigating these conflicts requires targeted community awareness and training programmes, establishing clear boundaries between protected areas and resident land, creating enforceable regulations, and sharing benefits equitably with local communities while halting settlement encroachment into the park.
Human-wildlife conflicts threaten both biodiversity conservation and rural livelihoods near protected areas. Understanding the specific drivers and traditional defence tactics helps conservationists and local authorities develop balanced interventions. Clear boundaries, equitable benefit sharing, and community engagement are essential to protect endangered ecosystems while safeguarding the safety and economic wellbeing of agrarian communities living alongside wildlife reserves.
The abstract does not indicate an application pathway or commercial product, as it focuses on social and environmental survey findings. However, the identified deterrent needs could inform developers of non-lethal wildlife management tools, such as improved fencing or sensor-based scaring devices for smallholder farmers and park managers. The work remains at an early diagnostic stage without direct testing of commercial technologies.
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Human-wildlife conflict occurs when the needs and behavior of wildlife impact negatively on humans or when humans negatively affect the needs of wildlife. To explore the nature, causes and mitigations of human wildlife conflict, the coexistence between human and wildlife assessment was conducted around Bale Mountains National Park. Data were collected by means of household questionnaires, focus group discussion, interview, field observation and secondary sources. The nature and extent of human wildlife conflict in the study area were profoundly impacted humans, wild animal and the environment through crop damage, habitat disturbance and destruction, livestock predation, and killing of wildlife and human. The major causes of conflict manifested that agricultural expansion (30%), human settlement (24%), overgrazing by livestock (14%), deforestation (18%), illegal grass collection (10%) and poaching (4%). To defend crop raider, farmers have been practiced crop guarding (34%), live fencing (26%), scarecrow (22%), chasing (14%), and smoking (5%). However, fencing (38%), chasing (30%), scarecrow (24%) and guarding (8%) were controlling techniques to defend livestock predator animals. As emphasized in this study, human-wildlife conflicts are negative impacts on both human and wildlife. Accordingly, possible mitigate possibilities for peaceful co-existence between human and wildlife should be create awareness and training to the local communities, identifying clear border between the closure area and the land owned by the residents, formulate rules and regulation for performed local communities, equal benefit sharing of the local communities and reduction of human settlement encroachment into the national park range. Generally, researcher recommended that stakeholders and concerned bodies should be creating awareness to local community for the use of wildlife and human-wildlife conflict mitigation strategies.
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DOI: 10.1186/s12898-020-00319-1
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