Integrating Social and Ecological Insights in the Management Plan for an Emerging Conservation Landscape: Kanha-Pench Corridor

Since its inception in 1973, Project Tiger, which laid the groundwork for India's tiger conservation program, has grown from 9 to 53 intensively monitored and managed tiger reserves. With an increase in tigers' permanent occupancy outside of designated tiger reserves, one of the many challenges confronting India's tiger conservation has been managing its success, with a particular emphasis on this spillover population that ranges extensively in human-dominated, multi-use forest landscapes. This research illustrates the application of a participatory modeling approach to integrate human dimensions with ecological knowledge about tigers in a previously identified forest corridor in Central India. Key dimensions of coexistence examined in the study include the human-centered perspective (i.e., human tolerance of tigers) and the tiger-centered perspective (i.e., tigers’ fitness) within their shared landscape. We began by investigating two notable Central Indian tribes, the Gond and Baiga tribes, documenting their knowledge and belief systems about tigers and emphasizing their conservation relevance, as such traditional systems are likely to act as tolerance-building mechanisms embedded within local cosmology. We conducted a qualitative analysis using a comprehensive set of 120 in-depth interviews during a critical ethnographic study. Some important themes included the history of the tiger deity, Bagh Deo worship, people's perceptions of the large cat, negotiation of shared spaces, and social dimensions of worship. Next, we developed a model containing a comprehensive set of predictors drawn from prior studies and tested it through a survey measuring human tolerance for tigers across the study area. Predictors included outcomes of interactions with tigers, perceptions of benefits and risks from tigers, trust in the forest department and perceived similarity with goals of the department, personal control over risks, and demographic factors. Using stratified purposeful sampling, in-person surveys were conducted in 644 households, considering a 95% confidence interval and 7% margin of error. Residents who perceived greater benefits associated with tigers, more positive impacts from tiger-related interactions, and greater trust in the forest department had higher tolerance. Further, we used patch-based metrics in graph theory based on the notion of centrality to move beyond and expand linkage mapping methods from single pairs of source-target nodes to all pairs of nodes in a graph to identify priority conservation areas across intervening habitat patches (protected and unprotected) at the landscape scale. By treating each pixel as a “patch”, we then calculated betweenness centrality. In this study, we used the betweenness centrality as the evaluation index for the importance of each patch. Finally, using local and expert knowledge, we integrated social and ecological insights gathered to model the probability of human-tiger coexistence in a spatially explicit manner within a participatory Bayesian network. We found that conditions for human-tiger coexistence vary depending on ecological factors, social factors influencing the level of human tolerance, such as people’s emotions and knowledge, economic factors, such as livelihoods, and policies, such as damage compensation. The resulting coexistence maps can help inform conservation decisions and be updated when new information becomes available.