Ament, Judith M.; (2020) Human-wildlife coexistence in a changing environment: understanding causes of vulnerability and resilience of wildlife to humans. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis details investigations into interactions between humans and free-roaming wildlife across wide-ranging spatial and temporal scales. The first chapter describes past evidence for human-wildlife interactions from modern and historical perspectives, focusing particularly on the impacts of and interplay between human development, human population growth and wildlife conservation efforts. The following four chapters present detailed new evidence on human-wildlife interactions from analysis of several large datasets. Chapter 2 investigates anthropogenic impacts on spatiotemporal population dynamics of European large mammals across the Holocene. This chapter demonstrates how the interplay between human population expansion and changing land use is linked to changing distributions of records of European large mammals over the last 12,000 years. Chapters 3 and 4 address human-wildlife interactions in the past 20 years. Chapter 3 investigates patterns in recent progress on the current policy agenda for sustainable development: the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). This chapter demonstrates the dependence of many SDG indicators on economic prosperity. Chapter 4 then brings these findings in relation with wildlife conservation, exposing positive linkages between economic growth and wildlife population trends in lower-income countries. Chapter 5 subsequently shifts from descriptive inference to predictive modelling. This chapter compares several predictive models to predict wildlife abundance trends under changing land use and climatic conditions and suggests that existing models struggle to generate predictions of wildlife population trends that align with observed data. This study thereby provides an important benchmark for the predictive accuracy of models predicting population abundance trends, providing a tale of caution for using such predictive models for projective purposes. The final chapter of this thesis synthesizes the findings on interactions between humans and wildlife across the varying datasets and spatial and temporal scales and discusses potential futures for human-wildlife coexistence.

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