How is human-wildlife coexistence affected by landscape change? Insights from studies since 2000
摘要
Landscape changes have the potential to impact people’s abilities to coexist with biodiversity. An analysis of patterns in such documented impacts is essential to understand similarities across geographical regions, research methodologies, and socio-ecological contexts, in addition to the variety of pathways through which human-wildlife coexistence has been shaped by distant and proximate landscape changes. In this paper, we examine selected studies that have provided evidence on how changes in land use, land-based livelihoods, and land use governance shape human-wildlife coexistence. We find that most research focused on assessing impacts of landscape changes on biophysical coexistence dimensions such as habitat size and spatiotemporal overlap between humans and wildlife. However, although impacts on social coexistence dimensions were less commonly studied, the studies still captured a significant variety in them despite the dominance of positivist research philosophies. An examination of studies originating from multiple disciplines shows that impacts of landscape change can spillover to multiple coexistence dimensions irrespective of whether the former is biophysical or social. We conclude that impacts on human-wildlife coexistence are conditional on the centrality of the coexistence dimension affected by landscape change, and hence, not all changes necessarily worsen coexistence.