Abstract:
Across Africa, lions (Panthera leo) are heavily persecuted in anthropogenic landscapes.
Trans-disciplinary research and virtual boundaries (geofences) programmed into
GPS-tracking transmitters offer new opportunities to improve coexistence. During a
24-month pilot study (2016–2018), we alerted communities about approaching lions,
issuing 1,017 alerts to four villages and 19 cattle posts. Alerts reflected geofence
breaches of nine lions (2,941 monitoring days) moving between Botswana’s Okavango
Delta and adjacent agro-pastoral communities. Daily alert system costs per lion were
US$18.54, or $5,460.24 per GPS deployment (n = 13). Alert-responsive livestock
owners mainly responded by night-kraaling of cattle (68.9%), significantly reducing their
losses (by $124.61 annually), whereas losses of control group and non-responsive
livestock owners remained high ($317.93 annually). Community satisfaction with alerts
(91.8%) was higher than for compensation of losses (24.3%). Study lions spent
26.3% of time monitored in geofenced community areas, but accounted for 31.0%
of conflict. Manual alert distribution proved challenging, static geofences did not
appropriately reflect human safety or the environment’s strong seasonality that influenced
cattle predation risk, and tracking units with on-board alert functions often failed or
under-recorded geofence breaches by 27.9%. These insufficiencies prompted the design
of a versatile and autonomous lion alert platform with automated, dynamic geofencing.
We co-designed this prototype platform with community input, thereby incorporating
user feedback. We outline a flexible approach that recognizes conflict complexity
and user community heterogeneity. Here, we describe the evolution of an innovative
Information and Communication Technologies-based (ICT) alert system that enables
instant data processing and community participation through interactive interfaces on
different devices. We highlight the importance of a trans-disciplinary co-design and development process focussing on community engagement while synthesizing expertise
from ethnography, ecology, and socio-informatics. We discuss the bio-geographic,
social, and technological variables that influence alert system efficacy and outline
opportunities for wider application in promoting coexistence and conservation.
