The social-ecological system concept recognizes the interdependent relationships between natural resources and their environment as well as human users and their public infrastructure. Scientific exploration of these systems is often predicated on local support for conservation, which is strongly influenced by perceptions of the impacts that local communities experience. Understanding why ecological conflicts occur is the first step in reducing their frequency and making headway toward social-ecological sustainability. This interdisciplinary study focuses on the interaction between the spatial distribution of natural resources (i.e. black bears) and potential conflicts with humans at the wildland-urban interface (WUI) based on humans’ socioeconomic attributes, physical overlap of land use, and importance given to the resource.
My study area is the rapidly urbanizing King County in Washington State. Starting in January 2018, I will use Public Participatory GIS to identify the spatial distribution of public values along the WUI interface. I will facilitate community workshops where respondents will be asked about their attitudes toward bears and preferences among three potential black bear management schemes. Participant responses will be uploaded into an ArcGIS Web application, creating a spatial layer for each value type with attributes for the demographics and priorities of each respondent.
To compare the values of community members and the spatial distribution of black bears, I will create a GIS layer compiling hotspots of use from radio-collared black bears in the past 5 years. Ecological data will be verified through ground truthing. A spatial correlation analysis will identify the extent to which different human values overlap in space with bear usage. Hotspots of reported bear incidents will be mapped by January.
I hypothesize management preferences will be based more on spatial intersections of high priority values than socioeconomic attributes and distance from WUI. The results will confirm whether spatial factors predict attitudes toward large carnivores in urban populations.
My research will provide a novel analysis of the overlap between publicly perceived ecosystem services and the needs of keystone species. The research will identify which human values are most in conflict with wildlife and uncover predictors of management preferences for people living near wildlife habitats.
Topics: Human-Wildlife Conflict , Topics: Cognitive Research (Values, Attitudes, Behaviors) , Topics: Conservation Planning and Evaluation
