Global patterns and trends in human-wildlife conflict compensation.

Human-wildlife conflict is a major conservation challenge, and compensation for wildlife damage is a widely used economic tool to mitigate this conflict. The effectiveness of this management tool is widely debated. The relative importance of factors associated with compensation success is unclear, and little is known about global geographic or taxonomic differences in the application of compensation programs. We reviewed research on wildlife-damage compensation to determine geographic and taxonomic gaps, analyze patterns of positive and negative comments related to compensation, and assess the relative magnitude of global compensation payments. We analyzed 288 publications referencing wildlife compensation and identified 138 unique compensation programs. These publications reported US$222 million (adjusted for inflation) spent on compensation in 50 countries since 1980. Europeans published the most articles, and compensation funding was highest in Europe, where depredation by wolves and bears was the most frequently compensated damage. Authors of the publications we reviewed made twice as many negative comments as positive comments about compensation. Three-quarters of the negative comments related to program administration. Conversely, three-quarters of the positive comments related to program outcomes. The 3 most common suggestions to improve compensation programs included requiring claimants to employ damage-prevention practices, such as improving livestock husbandry or fencing of crops to receive compensation (n = 25, 15%); modifying ex post compensation schemes to some form of outcome-based performance payment (n = 21, 12%); and altering programs to make compensation payments more quickly (n = 14, 8%). We suggest that further understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of compensation as a conflict-mitigation tool will require more systematic evaluation of the factors driving these opinions and that differentiating process and outcomes and understanding linkages between them will result in more fruitful analyses and ultimately more effective conflict mitigation.

Metamodels for transdisciplinary analysis of wildlife population dynamics.

Wildlife population models have been criticized for their narrow disciplinary perspective when analyzing complexity in coupled biological - physical - human systems. We describe a "metamodel" approach to species risk assessment when diverse threats act at different spatiotemporal scales, interact in non-linear ways, and are addressed by distinct disciplines. A metamodel links discrete, individual models that depict components of a complex system, governing the flow of information among models and the sequence of simulated events. Each model simulates processes specific to its disciplinary realm while being informed of changes in other metamodel components by accessing common descriptors of the system, populations, and individuals. Interactions among models are revealed as emergent properties of the system. We introduce a new metamodel platform, both to further explain key elements of the metamodel approach and as an example that we hope will facilitate the development of other platforms for implementing metamodels in population biology, species risk assessments, and conservation planning. We present two examples - one exploring the interactions of dispersal in metapopulations and the spread of infectious disease, the other examining predator-prey dynamics - to illustrate how metamodels can reveal complex processes and unexpected patterns when population dynamics are linked to additional extrinsic factors. Metamodels provide a flexible, extensible method for expanding population viability analyses beyond models of isolated population demographics into more complete representations of the external and intrinsic threats that must be understood and managed for species conservation.