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Anticipate and manage conflict from increasing populations, range expansions, or changing behaviors

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Approach

Climate change will help increase populations of some wildlife species and result in range shifts to new areas. New wildlife species in areas without the cultural knowledge or physical infrastructure to cope with new or newly abundant wildlife populations will require intervention to avert or reduce wildlife-human conflict (White and Ward 2011).

Tactics

  • Implement chemical or hormonal contraception in white-tailed deer to reduce populations in urban areas.
  • Increase trapping on orchards to reduce crop damage from expanding opossum populations in northern states.
  • Provide subsidies for income losses, such as subsidizing farmers and ranchers for lost income due to increased wildlife predation or harassment of livestock from expanding coyote populations.

Strategy Text

Human communities and wildlife will respond to climate change in ways that bring them together in new places or new levels of abundance. Wildlife managers will need to anticipate and address conflicts that are driven by climate change. This Strategy contains Approaches for reducing different potential conflicts.

Citation

LeDee, O.E., Handler, S.D., Hoving, C.L., Swanston, C.W. and Zuckerberg, B. 2021. Preparing Wildlife for Climate Change: How Far Have We Come? Jour. Wild. Mgmt., 85: 7-16. https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.21969
https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/approach/anticipate-and-manage-conflict-increasing-populations-range-expansions-or-changing