Landscape Architecture Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Landscape Architecture Theses and Dissertations by Subject "Crop depredation incidents"

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    Investigating Forest Elephant Crop Depredation to Guide Landscape Management for Villager-Elephant Coexistence
    (University of Oregon, 2023-03-24) Memiaghe, Herve Roland; Johnson, Bart
    Forest elephant destruction of villagers' crops in and around Gabon's national parks has persisted despite intensive efforts to control the problem by blocking elephant access to crops. I developed an alternative approach to craft spatially integrated landscape management strategies that simultaneously meet the needs of villagers and elephants, which I call a landscape framework for human-elephant coexistence. To craft the coexistence framework, I investigated factors influencing CDIs in two villages at Lopé National Park, Gabon. In chapter 2, I used content analysis of semi-structured interviews with 46 villagers and conservation professionals to explore how interacting landscape processes lead to CDIs. This generated a conceptual framework characterizing how six broadscale CDI drivers set in motion five landscape change dynamics, which in turn lead to five generalizable problem types that directly contribute to CDIs in village areas. In chapter 3, I combined the stakeholder interviews with a mapped census of native fruit tree distribution along elephant trails in the two villages and nearby forest, and long-term fruit phenology data to assess CDI distribution in relation to seasonal availability of native fruits and domestic crops. The results indicate that neither crop nor native fruit availability, nor the interaction between them, is a definitive factor controlling CDIs. Instead, they suggest that the spatial and temporal distribution of elephant resources and human activities within mosaics of natural and managed landscapes combine to influence elephant foraging behaviors, which in turn set the stage for CDIs. In chapter 4, I reframed each of the five problem types into a coexistence strategy, and identified a toolbox of 59 actions to form the core of the landscape coexistence framework, and used chapter three results to inform how strategies could be applied at local extents. Two of the five strategies were targeted to fulfilling elephant needs, two toward villager needs, and one toward reducing the spatial overlap of elephant foraging and villager cropping activities. The landscape coexistence framework serves as an overarching structure through which participatory planning could be conducted at the scale of individual villages or an entire national park like Lopé.