CAREER: Situated Resilience and the New Geographies of Wildlife-Livestock Interactions

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This Faculty Early-Career Development (CAREER) award will support a project that focuses on understanding the resilience and sustainability of rangelands in an era of changing ecological conditions and land management policies. The investigator whose work will be supported will investigate the drivers and consequences of these ecological and political changes for the conservation of biodiversity and sustainability of socioeconomic livelihoods. The project will provide valuable new kinds of basic knowledge. By structuring the research to account for the different ways in rangelands are managed, the investigator will be able to assess degree to which as well as how wildlife and livestock share the same spaces. The project will embrace both human and animal individual and group behaviors to clarify the nature of wildlife-livestock relationships, because existing understandings underestimate the role of grazing actions among both wild and domestic grazers. The results of this research will have a direct bearing on conservation and development policies around the world. New knowledge will be generated to aid in decision making regarding where, when, and under which contexts resource managers might encourage mixed use strategies with respect to livestock and wildlife grazing. These practices have the potential to increase the overall resilience and sustainability of drylands around the Earth. The project will provide education and training opportunities for students to enhance critical thinking and problem solving skills through experiential learning. The project will enable tourists visiting rangeland protected areas to obtain more accurate and relevant information regarding people and natural systems in and around parks. The project also is expected to provide new information and insights regarding ways to avoid entrenched pro-livestock or pro-biodiversity positions, thereby reducing the large economic and ecological costs of these positions. Rangelands are home to millions of livestock keeping pastoralists and sustaining large densities and distributions of wildlife. More recently, the resilience of rangeland protected areas is being threatened because of changes in where both wildlife and domestic livestock can graze, and the physical effects of grazing. Changes in seasonality have further constrained the resiliency of drylands. Current understandings about how people, wildlife, and livestock interact in rangelands have been devoid of appropriate social, political, and ecological contexts. As a result, there is limited knowledge about the interactions between wildlife and pastoralists' livestock inside rangeland protected areas. In order to better understand these dynamics, the investigator will evaluate how different management regimes influences patterns of wildlife and livestock resource use. He will determine the magnitude and extent to which resource patterns are influenced by both human and animal behaviors, and he will assess how wildlife and livestock resource-utilization patterns influence the ecology of rangelands. To achieve these objectives, the investigator will employ mixed methods approaches that combine ecological, social, and spatial field methods from a long-term study site within the Mara ecosystem in southern Kenya. Although conducted in this locale, the insights developed through this project will enhance basic understanding in a much broader range of locations, including many in the United States, where individuals and groups managing domesticated grazing animals share the same habitats with wild animals.