Responses by Households to Resource Scarcity and Human–Wildlife Conflict

In conserved areas like parks and forest regions which are surrounded by dense agricultural settlements,land use and resource extraction is severely limited. Local people are forced to turn to resource pools outside these areas for survival. The authors of this article combine remote sensing techniques and household surveys to examine landscape change and the implications for securing rural livelihoods. Forests and wetlands outside the park provide important resources such as fuel wood,building poles, and water, but they are also problematic for local farmers since crop raids by primates and elephants emanate from these fragments. Their analysis shows that since 1984 forests and wetlands have decreased in size and number and those that remain have become increasingly isolated within the agricultural mosaic. Farmers have adapted to resource shortages and human–wildlife conflict in different ways.This article is available at:http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jnz6/Professional/Publications/Hartter%20et%20al.,%202010.pdf