Human-wildlife Conflict Working Group

The Human-wildlife Conflict Working Group has come together through chance conversations and meetings along recent years, and the emergence of a shared interest in using games and simulation to better represent and understand human-wildlife coexistence and governance.

Climate change is expected to amplify human-wildlife conflict (HWC) across rural landscapes as water, forage, and cropland become more variable and contested. Wildlife impacts, such as crop damage or livestock predation, and human responses such as retaliatory killing threaten food security, biodiversity, and fragile governance systems. Yet policymakers and practitioners often lack tools that connect human decision-making with wildlife dynamics in ways that allow potential interventions to be tested before they are implemented. This project develops and evaluates an integrated approach combining participatory games and agent-based models (ABMs) to better understand and govern HWC under climate stress.

Specifically, our working group will tackle three interlinked objectives across 6 cases:

Objective 1: Develop and validate game-based representations of decision-making in climate-stressed HWC systems. We will assess whether structured game interventions can realistically represent the underlying drivers of HWC, s, make management tradeoffs salient to participants, and foster reflection on collective action under uncertainty.

Objective 2: Integrate behavioral insights from games into agent-based models that simulate landscape-scale coexistence dynamics. We will use observed decision patterns from game campaigns to parameterize ABMs that place human and wildlife actors on a shared computational footing, enabling exploration of medium- and long-term consequences of alternative governance responses.

Objective 3: Apply integrated games and models to examine how human behavior may amplify or dampen conflict under future climate stressors. Across six sites representing distinct social-ecological archetypes, we will analyze how behavioral responses interact with climate variability and governance interventions to shape trajectories of coexistence, and assess whether integrated tools can support shared understanding among communities, practitioners, and planners.