Shared areas between recreationists and wildlife: toward an integrated management of mountain socio-ecosystem – HUMANI

Outdoor activities create a permanent human presence in mountain territories. The increasing number of outdoor activities on mountain territory calls for a better understanding of human presence and their consequences on wildlife. This presence could indeed have negative effects on wildlife demography and mountain biodiversity. HUMANI is an interdisciplinary project that focuses on how outdoor recreation affect mountain ecosystems and from there on, provide managers with tools to better concile the development of outdoor activities with conservation and management of wildlife. It focuses on interrelationships between wildlife and both hiking (during summer and winter including snowshoe and mountaineering ski) and hunting activities. This project will identify and analyse human behavior in mountains and their different values linked to emblematic wildlife and conservation measures, while measuring the consequences of human presence on emblematic mountain wildlife. following the recommendations done by the french Biodiversity Research Foundation..
In order to understand the interrelationship between outdoor activities and mountain wildlife, our overarching goal is to develop an integrated analysis of (1) the use and perceptions of the environment by outdoor activities participants, (2) human-wildlife interactions in the shared spaces between humans and wildlife, (3) the management practices and effectiveness to raise recreationists awareness that together will lead to informed management guidelines. The analysis will focus on a gradient of territories with different status of protection and management in order to confront the interrelationships between recreationists and wildlife in a diversity of contexts. This inter-sites comparative analysis should disclose how extant management and protection status influence human and animal behaviors.
The expected project results are : (1) the development of an interdisciplinary methodology aimed at better understanding human - wildlife relationships ; (2) the identification of a typology of outdoor activities participants according to their outdoor activities experience and expectation and their perception of wildlife and of their own impacts on wildlife ; (3) the production of knowledge about human-wildlife interactions in shared spaces with different levels of constraining protection measures for human ; (4) the production of knowledge about wildlife disturbance and human impacts on ecosystem, which is essential for improving efficient management policies.