Assessing Land Use Changes in Areas with High Risk of Human-Brown Bear Conflict in Fars Province

Abstract

Assessing habitat changes is an important step in the spatial prioritization of management efforts, aimed at reducing conflicts. We assessed landuse/cover change in areas with high risk of human-bear conflict in Fars province. In the first step, we predicted the conflict hotspots, using bear damage incidents, a suit of predictors, and the Ensembles of Small Models (ESMs) approach. In the second step, we assessed the trend of landuse/cove changes in a 30-years period in the areas with medium to high risk of conflict, using remote sensing techniques. Results of conflict risk modeling showed that proportion of suitable habitats, distance to village, density of forest patches, and corridor bottlenecks were the main predictors, contributing to bear damaging risk. A total of 3.75 and 6.91% of the landscape were identified as the areas with high and medium risk, respectively. Assessment of landuse/cove changes showed that in a period of 30 years, the extent of croplands and orchards has increased from 12,167 to 52,662 hectares. Such a substanitial landuse/cover changes can increase the risk of bear damages. The obtained results emphasize that inter-organizational planning is an emergency effort in mitigating human-bear conflicts.