As the world becomes rapidly urbanized, wildlife habitats become more encroached upon, leading to greater wildlife colonization of urban habitats. This has led to a dramatic increase in human-wildlife conflicts (HWC), be it threats to human life, wildlife attacks on pets, vehicle collisions, or property damage. Attitudes and perceptions of people within urban areas directly impact how urban wildlife is managed; this highlights the importance of having a well-developed understanding of attitudes towards wildlife. The paper “Perceptions and Attitudes to Understand the human-wildlife Conflict in an Urban Landscape – A Systematic Review” explores that by reviewing many studies and drawing conclusions about the relationship between public opinion and wildlife management. 

The systematic review seeks to answer two questions: How were the perceptions or attitudes of urban residents used to understand urban HWC, and how does the inclusion of citizens’ perceptions or attitudes assist in reducing urban HWC? The authors utilized the PRISMA framework for their systematic review, which are academic standards and protocols to review large amounts of research articles that allow other researchers to reproduce their findings. It’s a transparent research methodology. The inclusion criteria of the paper can be summarized by the papers being relevant to the stated research question, the paper being published after the year 1999, the paper being written in English (which may be a limitation to the study, given its global applicability), the paper being peer-reviewed. The exclusion criteria of the paper can be summarized by relevance to public perception through questionnaires or surveys, non-wild species (such as domesticated animals), and studies conducted in rural areas or laboratory environments. Refer to Figure 1, a graphic representation of the PRISMA framework.

After the literature was screened, the data was extracted from them; several graphical representations were made to show the geographical distribution of the research and the frequency of keywords through word clouds. The country with the largest number of studies was the United States, with 43 research articles comprising 34.68% of the literature. Of that 43 articles, 52 species out of the 56 species mentioned in those papers were mammals and mainly predators (bears, grey wolves, coyotes, and cougars); this made me wonder if this was caused by the large controversy of reintroducing tertiary predators out west. If so, understanding public opinion in those communities would be important because it’s a divisive issue, with some communities being strongly opposed due to livestock predation, property damage, and generally posing a threat to human safety. On the other side of the debate, environmentalists strongly support the reintroduction of predators to restore ecological balance and control prey populations.

The takeaways the authors had for the reader were as follows. Frequent observations of wildlife boost tolerance levels among residents in urban areas, leading to more preference for less lethal wildlife management strategies to mitigate and control conflicts. A large limitation of the current literature on public perception and attitudes is that it fails to address more than one species on a longer time scale. There was a lack of longitudinal studies to study the changes in public perceptions, which should be a high priority among researchers given its impact on effective wildlife management. Addressing that research gap could provide valuable insights into how urban communities evolve in their understanding and acceptance of wildlife.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X23004612