While territoriality is one of the key mechanisms influencing carnivore space use, most studies quantify resource selection and movement in the absence of conspecific influence or territorial structure. Our analysis incorporated social information in a resource selection framework to investigate mechanisms of territoriality and intra-specific competition on the habitat selection of a large, social carnivore. We fit integrated step selection functions to 3-hour GPS data from 12 collared African wild dog packs in the Okavango Delta, and estimated selection coefficients using a conditional Poisson likelihood with random effects. Packs selected for their neighbors’ 30-day boundary (defined as their 95% kernel density estimate), and for their own 90-day core (defined as their 50% kernel density estimate). Neighbors’ 30-day boundary had a greater influence on resource selection than any habitat feature. Habitat selection differed when they were within versus beyond their neighbors’ 30-day boundary. Pack size, pack tenure, pup presence, and seasonality all mediated how packs responded to neighbors’ space use, and seasonal dynamics altered the strength of residency. While newly-formed packs and packs with pups avoided their neighbors’ boundary, older packs and those without pups selected for it. Packs also selected for the boundary of larger neighboring packs more strongly than that of smaller ones. Social structure within packs has implications for how they interact with conspecifics, and therefore how they are distributed across the landscape. Future research should continue to investigate how territorial processes are mediated by social dynamics and, in turn, how territorial structure mediates resource selection and movement. These results could inform the development of a human-wildlife conflict (HWC) mitigation tool by co-opting the mechanisms of conspecific interactions to manage space use of endangered carnivores. Human-wildlife conflict poses a significant risk to wide-ranging carnivore populations worldwide. Management techniques that promote localized, spatial separation and reduce conflict between humans and wildlife are key to carnivore conservation. However, there is a lack of experimentally-verified deterrent methods for maintaining spatial separation between humans and wildlife. Manipulating animal movement by co-opting behavioral mechanisms, such as mimicking conspecific interactions or creating landscapes of fear, offer promising, theory-driven solutions to managing wildlife. For territorial carnivores in particular, researchers have successfully altered movement and behavior of animals using translocated scent in empirical experiments, yet most did not consider management implications. Here we experimentally tested the impact of translocated scent on the behavior, movement, and space use of 5 African wild dog packs in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, to investigate whether translocated scent can be used as a conservation tool. This three-month experiment included simultaneous exposure of all packs to both experimental and control treatments. Packs were more likely to find and behaviorally respond to wild dog scent than to control scent. While packs were more likely to investigate treated areas compared to controls, they reduced the distance they travelled beyond their territories by 21.1% on average (95% confidence interval: 8.5% to 33.7%, p-value = 0.0327), suggesting scent acts as a finer-scale attractant but a larger-scale deterrent. Additionally, packs had more consistently directed movements through treated areas (Pearson’s r = 0.81). Our results suggest that manipulating territorial animals through translocated scent is a potential conservation method for managing extra-territorial forays into, or settlement within, human-dominated areas where conflict may occur. We argue that the targeted use of translocated scent during certain times of year or to manage specific behaviors, such as den-site selection or settlement of dispersers, could be an effective, non-lethal deterrence strategy for African wild dogs, with potential for other territorial species.
While non-lethal deterrence strategies are important methods for ecological solutions to wildlife disturbance, it is critical conservationists contextualize conservation agendas in human social systems. Conservation research and management has seen increasing sustainability, participation, and success when conservationists address HWC in a socioecological framework. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is a region that has had a confluence of intensive, international conservation interest, and a large proportion of rural poor who rely on household-level agriculture. Botswana is a particularly understudied region of SSA relative to others. In the Okavango Delta there is disparate resource access across communities, but in the Western Panhandle households are among the poorest in the nation. In this chapter I propose a framework, drawing on a rich body of pre-existing literature, to consider livelihoods, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity to HWC a rural-agrarian setting. We analyzed the results of a household economic survey, deployed to over 500 households in the Panhandle of the Delta, to understand: 1) how livelihoods vary across villages, 2) how HWC influences household vulnerability, and 3) how households increase adaptive capacity to deal with HWC. The dataset was marked by multiple shortcomings, which did not allow us to investigate the full extent of our framework as proposed. HWC was nearly a universally reported phenomenon by all households, regardless of community, land tenure, or any other variable. Households were incredibly reliant on exogenous assistance from the government, and food insecurity was both highly prolific, increasing in severity, and seasonal.. While results suggest HWC does not seem to be a primary driver of vulnerability or adaptive capacity in this area., this may be because the survey instrument lacked questions that allowed responders to make meaning out of wildlife encounters. We therefore propose the underlying mechanisms that be confounding these data, and or misrepresenting the relationship between HWC and households. I consider other research directions, specifically for this area but also other rural-agrarian settings, which include more ethnographically salient approaches to unravel HWC in socioecological landscapes.
