A mixed-methods assessment of human-elephant conflict trends in the Western Okavango Panhandle

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Erin Buchholtz and Amanda Stronza, Texas A&M University, Erin Buchholtz, United States Geological Survey, Megan E. McDaniels, Wild Me, Anna Songhurst and Graham McCulloch, University of Oxford, Anna Songhurst, Graham McCulloch and Amanda Stronza, Ecoexist Project

Background/Question/Methods
Human-elephant conflict (HEC) can severely undermine conservation and sustainable land-use efforts, and disproportionately impacts vulnerable communities. To understand the drivers of HEC and its broader ecological and social impacts, and to develop effective management strategies, we need an understanding of long-term trends and specific characteristics of individual conflict incidents. The Western Okavango Panhandle in Botswana is inhabited by rural farming communities who share and compete for resources with a growing African savanna elephant population. The broader elephant population in northern Botswana is the largest in the world, but HEC and elephant demographics have been chronically understudied in the Western Panhandle, and there are no empirical studies quantifying HEC in this region. We assessed spatiotemporal HEC trends using reported HEC incidents (2008-2016), 2016 surveys of individual perceptions and mitigation strategies for HEC encompassing the 1990s-2016, and detailed field raid assessments (2016).
Results/Conclusions
Crop raiding was consistently the major form of reported HEC. We found an increasing interannual trend in reported HEC incidents between 2008 and 2016, from 141 incidents to 773, with frequency and intensity of crop raids shifting to the north over that time period (n= 3,549, R2 = 0.7928). Farmers perceived elephant population and HEC to have greatly increased since 2000, including an increasing level of raiding by breeding herds. At the intra-annual scale, we found that male elephant groups were responsible for a majority of incidents (81.22%), but female groups caused greater damage per field (p<0.001, n=229, 43f, 186m). Both sexes were more likely to raid fields that had been previously raided (86% of total female raids, 82.8% of total male raids). Female groups were more likely to raid fields in the southern portion of the study area (83.33% of total female raids), while male groups were slightly more likely to raid in the north (53.33% of total male raids). Farmers indicated that their crop raiding mitigation strategies were primarily limited to active guarding, burning wood for smoke and fire, and constructing fences that were largely inadequate at excluding elephants. This combination of quantitative reporting and assessment data and qualitative local ecological knowledge allows for a multidimensional understanding of HEC, and is a broadly replicable methodology. It provides a reliable retrospective characterization of long-term trends despite scarce historical data, while also highlighting the need for greater scientific attention in this region in order to better understand the underlying drivers of HEC and predict future trends.