Mapping Social Networks, Livestock Depredation, and Carnivore Tolerance in Tanzania
Category: Research Poster
Author(s): Mary Callaghan, Jonathan Salerno, Rekha Warrier
Presenter(s): Mary Callaghan
Mentors(s): Jonathan Salerno
Many agropastoralist communities in Tanzania, East Africa, confront the daily realities of living alongside large carnivores such as African lions, leopards, and spotted hyena. These realities include risk of predation on livestock and also attacks on humans. As a result, human tolerance for living with carnivores is often low, and carnivores are persecuted in many ways, which poses critical challenges for biodiversity conservation. Though tolerance is critical if people are to coexist with wildlife, significant gaps remain regarding the scientific understanding of human tolerance for wildlife, as well as how tolerance is shaped and changes over time. The purpose of this research is to use a novel dataset describing social networks among agropastoralists gathered via mobile phone data, and to represent those data alongside survey data describing people’s experience with and tolerance for interactions with carnivores. Exploratory results show visualizations of social networks and descriptive summaries of tolerance and predation data. Future research will assess causal relationships whereby predation experiences, including those of kin households connected through social networks, influence tolerance for carnivores. Current and future results can inform conservation partners and their strategies to target coexistence interventions within connected communities.