Big Cats around the globe: How communities around the globe perceive their backyard big cats
Corcoran, Will C
Corcoran, Will C
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Abstract
The conservation of big cats, a group typically defined as including tigers, lions, mountain lions, jaguars, leopards, snow leopards (and cheetahs here) is a global issue that impacts ecological health, economic status, and cultural history. As human encroachment in big cat habitat continues, human-cat conflict is also on the rise in most big cat territories. Studying the relationships between big cats and locals living nearby big cat habitat can help us uncover the most acceptable conservation strategies for these rare charismatic species. We explored human-big cat relationships by conducting a systematic literature review of journal articles that research local’s perceptions of their local big cat species. We used several databases including Web of Science, Academic Search Premier, and Environment complete to conduct our search. We used two set of search terms, one with names of big cats (i.e. tiger*), and another with vocabulary words used to describe human’s response (i.e. accept*). Our goal was to find articles that collect data on local perceptions of big cats. Our screening process led us to initially find 1400 articles. We filtered these 1400 articles down to 202, and a final list of 71 articles that had quantitative data on local perceptions of nearby big cat species. We find that local perceptions and acceptability of big cats vary across landscapes and species, but perhaps one of the biggest results of this review is where it highlights just how much we do not know about the local human perceptions and views towards big cats. These gaps are likely to create large challenges for future big cat conservation.
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11:00 AM
1:00pm-3:00pm
Undergraduate
1:00pm-3:00pm
Undergraduate
Date
2019-01-01