Elephant barrier behaviors in response to conflict mitigation fences
Dominique Gonçalves, Robert J. Smith, Helen M. K. O'Neill

TL;DR
Beehive fences in Mozambique reduced human-elephant conflicts by blocking elephant movement and changing where conflicts occur.
Contribution
The study evaluates the effectiveness of community-run beehive fences in mitigating human–elephant conflict using barrier behavior analysis.
Findings
Beehive fences blocked elephant movement in 69.3% of encounters, more than a natural river barrier.
Human–elephant conflict incidents dropped from 566 to 117 per year after fence construction.
Conflict incidents moved farther from the park boundary, increasing mean distance from 0.98 to 1.97 km.
Abstract
Human–wildlife conflict is a major conservation issue, particularly in lower income countries, where it affects marginalized people and leads to the extirpation of threatened species. Managers increasingly use fences to reduce this conflict but lack evidence on the effectiveness of these barriers, especially on whether this reduces the number of incidents or only shifts the problem elsewhere. We adapted an approach designed to measure how individual animals respond to barriers (barrier behavior analysis) to evaluate a human–wildlife conflict intervention. We used movement data from 20 GPS‐collared elephants to assess the extent to which their behavior was influenced by community‐managed beehive fences around Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. We measured the number of times elephants were stopped by the fences and compared this with the number of times elephants were stopped by a…
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Taxonomy
TopicsWildlife Ecology and Conservation · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology · Wildlife-Road Interactions and Conservation
