This digital collection includes presentations given at the 8th International Wildlife Ranching Symposium held in 2014 for the symposium theme: Human and Wildlife Conflicts.
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Browsing Human and Wildlife Conflicts by Author "Chavernac, David, speaker"
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014-09) Le Bel, Sébastien, speaker; Chavernac, David, speaker; Breck, Stewart, moderator; International Wildlife Ranching Symposium, producer
Human-wildlife conflicts have drastically increased around conservation areas in Africa in recent decades, thus undermining the peaceful cohabitation of wildlife populations and rural human settlements. Mitigation packages include various reporting forms, which are often ineffective since the information conveyed is generally scattered and useless. The booming mobile phone sector and the popular use of text messages (SMS) have provided an opportunity to assess the impact of real-time communication systems in human-wildlife conflict mitigation strategies. After preliminary tests conducted in Mozambique and Zimbabwe with FrontlineSMS, we improved the recording and transfer of raw information generated at field level with the development of an integrated system called SYSMAS. Apart from improving the quality of wildlife based information, SYSMAS was developed as a handy management tool informing in real time decision makers and easy to upload even without specific computer skills. This paper details how easy any human-wildlife conflict incident or wildlife event can be translated into a set of explanatory variables and captured on mobile phones with ad-hoc SMS models. According to local communication facilities, real-time sharing of the information could be achieved directly through a Web interface or via SMS; this last been more handy in remote African farmland. Once adopted, such a human-wildlife conflict early warning system could be deployed at low cost. The same approach could be promoted for the establishment of reporting systems on wildlife disease outbreaks.
