by Michelle Henriksen, Adam Barnett, Paul Butcher, Andrew Chin, Katherine Frisch, Marcel Green, Jason How, Daryl McPhee, Michael Mikitis, Tracey Scott-Holland, Colin Simpfendorfer, Stephen Taylor, and Charlie Huveneers

Read the full paper here.

As human and wildlife habitats increasingly overlap globally, the occurrence and complexity of human-wildlife conflict is also growing. Negative human-shark interactions have led to a range of government-led mitigation measures to be developed and implemented including nets, drumlines and/or targeted fishing. Stakeholders often hold differing values and concerns, and understanding these values allows for more effective decision making. Structured frameworks can help compare and assist in determining preferred mitigation measures to reduce complex conflict situations, e.g., human-shark interactions.

Our framework incorporates a social science survey to compare shark-bite mitigation by evaluating how well a mitigation measure performs against socio-economic and ecological criteria and accounting for what stakeholders value the most. We tested our framework by applying it to a case study — the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia — and assessed 15 mitigation measures, including both lethal (e.g., nets and drumlines) and non-lethal options (e.g., SMART drumlines, barriers, detection and alert systems, human behavioural change, personal deterrent devices, and the use of no mitigation measure).

Our findings reiterate a social shift towards non-lethal measures, as these options performed better for values that were important to stakeholders compared to lethal measures. Overall, stakeholders placed more importance on human safety and reducing impacts on biodiversity (reducing negative impacts on target species, non-target species, and the surrounding habitat). The results indicate that more than one measure might be suitable and that a collective collaboration between government and individuals (e.g., area protection, behavioural change and education) would likely be most efficient in reducing risk.

The flexibility of our framework makes it applicable to a range of human-wildlife conflict situations by allowing the inputs to be modified to suit different locations and stakeholder views. Our framework forms an integral part of the solution to complex human-wildlife conflict management.