Browsing by Author "Breck, Stewart, advisor"

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Open Access
Exploring compensation programs and depredation reporting for wolf-livestock conflict across the North American West
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Nickerson, Rae, author; Evangelista, Paul, advisor; Breck, Stewart, advisor; Niemiec, Rebecca, committee member; Hoag, Dana, committee member
With the continuing reestablishment of wolves (Canis lupus) across the American West, livestock producers will be increasingly exposed to wolf-related conflict such as livestock depredation. The financial implications of wolf conflict can be significant depending on the context of an individual livestock operation. Compensation programs administered by government agencies and occasionally non-government organizations aim to ameliorate some of the financial risks associated with wolves and the loss of livestock; yet the effectiveness of these programs at fostering tolerance and adequately addressing losses is increasingly questioned. Reporting depredation is often required for compensation eligibility, and reports are the primary source of data used by wildlife agencies to address conflict and inform local management. Yet not all producers report depredation or utilize compensation, and we know very little about what factors motivate reporting and compensation use. Additionally, we know very little about producer perspectives on existing compensation programs or whether producers are interested in alternatives. I designed an exploratory survey based on an expanded version of the Theory of Planned Behavior to identify the social-psychological and demographic factors most strongly correlated with compensation use and wolf depredation reporting intentional outcomes. I also utilized a simplified Discrete Choice Question to gauge producer interest in alternatives to traditional compensation programs. My online survey was sent to livestock producers across Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Washington, Wyoming, and Alberta, Canada (n=165 responses). While 87% of respondents experiencing wolf depredation had reported a depredation in the past, only 69% had utilized compensation. Levels of satisfaction with existing compensation programs were mixed. The most common reasons stated for not applying for compensation included dissatisfaction with the depredation confirmation process (too much validation and/or paperwork), that the amount of compensation available is not enough or not worth the hassle of applying for compensation, and a lack of trust and satisfaction with state government employees and their wolf management decisions. Using Lasso regression, I found that descriptive norms (p<0.01), age (p<0.01), and past experience with depredation (p<0.05) were the strongest predictors of reporting intention. Trust (p<0.001), perceived risk (p<0.05), descriptive and personal norms (p≦0.05), attitudes (p<0.05), and state of residence (varied by state) had the strongest relationship with compensation use intention. The overall predictive power of my models was high, suggesting the expanded Theory of Planned Behavior model was effective at predicting both behavioral intentions. The results of my Choice Question suggest that my surveyed population wants access to diverse and adaptive payment and engagement options for wolf depredation. I also found that although these producers are interested in alternatives like Habitat Leases and Cost-Shares for financial and technical assistance with conflict reduction tools, they still want access to traditional compensation for depredation to address local variation in depredation across neighboring operations. Although limited by my sample size, these findings suggest that 1. building interpersonal trust between wildlife agency personnel and livestock producers, 2. reducing wolf-related financial vulnerability by providing compensation for indirect losses and/or undetected wolf depredations in addition to payments for depredation, and 3. building descriptive norms by providing peer-to-peer knowledge sharing opportunities for producers to share with one another may all increase reporting and compensation use intentions among livestock producers, and by extension, may influence behavior.
Open Access
Human-carnivore conflict mitigation on ranchlands in the western United States and eastern Colombia
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Hyde, Matthew David, author; Crooks, Kevin, advisor; Breck, Stewart, advisor; Teel, Tara, committee member; Wittemyer, George, committee member; Young, Julie, committee member
Conflict between large carnivores and ranching livelihoods is a persistent challenge for carnivore conservation and management. Shifting societal views of large carnivore management at the end of the 20th century led to population recovery and, in some cases, reintroduction to their former range. Working lands, productive areas encompassing a matrix of human land use and natural land cover, are an important part of carnivore range as they provide vital habitat and connectivity between protected areas. However, large carnivores can have direct and indirect impacts to humans and human livelihoods on working lands through livestock depredation, increased labor to mitigate depredations, and in some cases risk to human safety. In the Western United States, the reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus) and the recolonization of grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) are hailed as species recovery success stories but have been met with resistance from rural ranching communities. Wildlife managers, researchers, and other entities throughout the region seek to reduce livestock producers' burden of living with large carnivores while ensuring sustainable populations. On the plains of Eastern Colombia, jaguars (Panthera onca) are recolonizing former range after being nearly extirpated following centuries of conflict over livestock and the pelt trade in the mid-20th century. In Colombia, jaguars depredate livestock, but there is little government support for the implementation of prevention tools and no compensation for losses, leaving non-governmental organizations as the sole implementers of conflict mitigation. In both contexts, wildlife managers require tools and strategies to address livelihood impacts and incentivize human-carnivore coexistence. Development and evaluation of these methods is important to ensure that limited resources are being utilized effectively. In this dissertation, I examine human-carnivore conflict in the Western United States and Eastern Colombia through three lenses: population trends related to conservation interventions for large carnivores; evaluation of non-lethal conflict reduction tools; and the human dimensions of non-lethal mitigation. In Chapter 1, I examine jaguar population trends on a working ranch and wildlife tourism destination in Casanare, Colombia. We integrated nine years of camera trap data and tourist photos to estimate jaguar survival, abundance, and probability of tourist sightings through a Barker Robust Design mark-recapture model. We then used spatially explicit capture-recapture to estimate jaguar density and compare it to a 2014 estimate. We found that abundance increased from 5 ± 0.26 individuals in 2014 to 28 ± 2.7 in 2022, and density increased from 1.88 ± 0.87 per 100 km2 in 2014 to 3.80 ± 1.08 jaguars per 100 km2 in 2022. We estimated survival rate of 78 ± 0.08% for males and 80 ± 0.07% for females. The probability of a tourist viewing a jaguar increased from 0 ± 0.11% in 2014 to 40 ± 0.18% in 2020 before the Covid-19 pandemic. We provide the first robust estimates of jaguar survival and abundance on working lands. Our findings highlight the importance of productive lands for jaguar conservation and suggest that a tourism destination and working ranch can host an abundant population of jaguars when accompanied by conservation agreements and conflict interventions. Our analytical model that combines conventional data collection with tourist sightings can be applied to other species that are observed during tourism activities. In chapter 2, I evaluate the effectiveness of diversionary feeding—providing food caches to divert predators away from preying on livestock—to reduce depredations by reintroduced Mexican wolves in the US states of New Mexico and Arizona. We used data from the Mexican wolf recovery program from 2014-2021 in a Bayesian hierarchical model to evaluate whether diversionary feeding reduced livestock depredations by wolf packs and what factors correlated with depredations. Our model accounted for the non-detection of depredation events, given that some depredations are unencountered or unreported on extensive rangelands. We found that diversionary feeding reduced depredations on average by 0.78 ± 0.03 depredations (43.9%) per pack per year. Prey density was negatively correlated to depredations before diversionary feeding. Minimum pack size and annual livestock density were negatively correlated with depredations after diversionary feeding, while prey density was positively correlated. We estimated a mean of 63 ± 5.4% of depredations were detected with high variation between packs (40.4 ± 7.9 % – 74.0 ± 5.3%). Because detections were only two-thirds of model-estimated depredations in our study, our model could improve compensation and targeting of nonlethal tools to mitigate the financial burden of co-occurrence with wolves by elucidating factors that lead to lower detection and adjusting livestock loss compensation multipliers. Our results indicate diversionary feeding can reduce livestock depredations by wolves on large landscapes in the Western United States but is not a panacea for conflict reduction. In chapter 3, I examine the context of human tolerance for large carnivores before and after the implementation of electric fencing to reduce depredations by jaguars. Non-lethal mitigation is often implemented under the premise that ranchers' tolerance for large carnivores will increase once losses or reduced or eliminated. However, deep-rooted psychological and cultural factors can be equally, if not more, important for predicting tolerance. We conducted structured interviews in four communities in the Colombian Llanos to characterize conflict, identify predictors of retaliatory killings of jaguars, and evaluate the impact of a fencing intervention to increase tolerance. The social psychological variables from the theory of planned behavior were a better predictor of intention to kill a jaguar than past and expected livestock losses. The intervention did not increase tolerance, likely because self-selection bias led to a treatment group that was tolerant pre-intervention. Sixty percent of respondents reported moderate to severe livestock losses during year 1, highlighting the urgent need to identify broader mitigation strategies for livestock depredation. Positive attitudes and normative support in favor of retaliatory killings were pervasive, while 24% of respondents were intolerant—having positive attitudes of and intent to retaliate against a jaguar following the next livestock depredation. Our results suggest that a strategy focused only on reducing depredation is unlikely to reduce retaliatory killings, as losses are not the only driver of retaliation. The pervasiveness of livestock losses and support for retaliatory killings demonstrate a need for immediate action to reduce livelihood impacts and consider alternative, bottom-up approaches to conflict mitigation in the area. My research indicates that wildlife tourism and diversionary feeding are two strategies that can mitigate the livelihood impacts of large carnivore presence. Wildlife tourism on Colombian ranchlands provides tangible economic benefits to landowners to conserve jaguars, other wildlife, and their habitat. We observed an important population increase for the locally threatened jaguar, and conserving jaguar habitat likely has reverberating benefits for ecosystem services and other wildlife through prey hunting prohibitions. Further work is necessary, however, to understand the distribution of costs and benefits from jaguar tourism and population growth in the surrounding community to ensure equitable conservation outcomes. In addition, diversionary feeding proved to be an effective tool to reduce depredations by Mexican wolves in the Southwestern U.S. The integration of non-detection of depredation events in our analysis is an important contribution to carnivore management because it can elucidate uncompensated livelihood impacts which aggravate intolerance for carnivores. This tool could be applied to other populations of carnivores to mitigate losses and may be more easily deployed than some deterrents. Findings from my third chapter reinforce the importance of understanding the human dimensions of human-carnivore conflict prior to implementing conflict reduction strategies. Interventions based solely on livestock losses may be unsuccessful at reducing retaliatory killings if losses are not the only driver of intolerance of carnivores. Ultimately, human-carnivore conflicts and interventions to prevent them are nested with unique social, cultural, ecological, political, and economic context. The failure of interventions to recognize how carnivore behavior interacts with local human contexts may ultimately exacerbate conflict and lead to counterproductive mitigation strategies.
Open Access
Understanding and mitigating coyote predation on black-footed ferrets
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Windell, Rebecca Much, author; Breck, Stewart, advisor; Angeloni, Lisa, committee member; Bailey, Larissa, committee member; Eads, David, committee member
Coyotes (Canis latrans) kill more livestock than any other mammal in the U.S. and can be important predators of vulnerable native fauna. In prairie ecosystems, coyotes are the primary predator of endangered black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes; hereafter, ferret), where coyote predation can significantly hamper ferret recovery efforts. To better understand coyote predation on ferrets we used remote wildlife cameras, occupancy models, and overlap of circadian activity patterns to investigate multiple abiotic, biotic, and temporal factors hypothesized to influence coyote use of prairie dog colonies, and by proxy coyote-ferret interactions. We first assessed coyote preferences between prairie dog colonies and surrounding available grasslands and found coyotes used prairie dog colonies nearly twice as much as surrounding grasslands. Next, we investigated biotic and abiotic factors that may influence coyote use and frequency of use on prairie dog colonies. We found high coyote use across our study area, but frequency of use varied across prairie dog colonies and was higher in areas of high badger occurrence. Badgers and coyotes are known to form hunting associations and high overlap between coyote and badger activity patterns in our study further supported spatial use patterns revealed by our occupancy analysis. Strong interspecific competition and patterns of resource selection between badgers and ferrets have been documented in previous studies, and as a result, our study suggests that coyote attraction to badgers may be the principal influence on coyote-ferret interactions. To mitigate coyote predation on ferrets we excluded coyotes from ferret occupied areas with a new non- lethal tool, coyote fladry (hereafter; fladry), and rigorously assessed fladry's effectiveness for future use in both ecological and agricultural scenarios. Again using wildlife camera data, we evaluated coyote fladry with multi-season occupancy models, where we estimated probabilities of use (i.e., occupancy), avoidance (i.e., extinction), attraction (i.e., colonization), and activity (i.e., detection) in response to fladry. Our results indicate fladry reduced coyote use and activity within protected areas for at least 60 days; however, coyotes also increased activity around, and were attracted to, the periphery of fladry exclosures, suggesting fladry may function in a way that is counterintuitive to management expectations. Occupancy models permit robust evaluation of nonlethal tools beyond binary terms of success and failure and provide valuable additional information, such as the behavioral responses of carnivores to these tools. Coyote fladry does not deter badger use of protected areas, and given the importance of badgers in predicting coyote use of colonies, future efforts to reduce coyote predation on ferrets should compare the effectiveness of tools that exclude both badgers and coyotes to our study's results.