Linking climate impacts on animal movement, community dynamics, and human-wildlife coexistence

Abstract

Climate extremes are increasing in frequency and severity globally, with cascading consequences for wildlife behavior, species interactions, and human-wildlife coexistence. Climate change impacts wildlife via long-term changes, such as rising ambient and sea surface temperatures, as well as extreme disturbance events, such as heatwaves, wildfires, and drought. These extreme events can directly impact animals via increased mortality or via indirect mechanisms, such as by influencing resource availability. Such variation in resource abundance and distribution has important implications for ecological communities, causing shifts in phenology, life history strategies, and movement decisions that can have cascading impacts on animal behavior and fitness. Movement is a key way that animals respond to this spatiotemporal heterogeneity in resource availability. Although movement decisions manifest at the individual level, they can scale up to impact ecological communities as well as interactions with people. However, we currently lack understanding of how the impacts of climate variability on individual carnivore behavior translate into changes to community dynamics and realized human–wildlife conflict, particularly for wide-ranging and cryptic species such as large carnivores. To fill this gap, this dissertation uses 12 years of GPS tracking data from four sympatric large carnivore species and a decade of government conflict records to examine how climate-driven changes in resource availability shape carnivore movement, species interactions, and human–carnivore coexistence in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, a system characterized by high carnivore density, extensive overlap between wildlife and pastoral communities, and increasing climate variability. I examine how drought affects carnivore space use and competition (Chapter 1), how drought and heat affect carnivore behavior in relation to human-dominated areas (Chapter 2), and how drought and heat influence reported human–carnivore conflicts (Chapter 3). In Chapter 1, I find that drought expands home ranges across species and increases spatial overlap between dominant and subordinate competitors, revealing how climate-driven changes in movement can reshape community interactions. In Chapter 2, I find that African wild dogs increased settlement visitation during drought to sites with anthropogenic water sources and livestock, and that visitation rates were modulated by extreme temperature. Finally, in Chapter 3, I find that temperature also interacted with drought to influence conflict rates, with extreme heat increasing conflicts during wet conditions and suppressing them during drought conditions. Together, these results show that climate extremes have a clear signature on carnivore behavior, propagating from individual movement decisions through community interactions to outcomes for people. By examining these questions across ecological and applied datasets, multiple species, and interacting climate stressors, my research aims to holistically inform climate-targeted, multi-stressor management strategies that foster coexistence for carnivores and communities under increasing climatic variability.​​