Integrating Participatory Mapping and Stewardship Perspectives to Support Human–Wildlife Coexistence in Shared Landscapes

Understanding the drivers of coexistence between humans and wildlife in shared landscapes is critical for biodiversity conservation. This inquiry challenges us to reflect on our relationships with nature and highlights the need to consider the complexity of social-ecological systems. Although useful approaches exist for mapping the distribution of species, habitats, or ecosystems using statistical methods, a purely bio-physical description of space cannot account for the diversity of relationships within the system and the complexity of coexistence issues. In this study, we adopted a transdisciplinary approach to understand coexistence processes between humans and wildlife in the Garden Route region of South Africa. We estimate species’ distributions using a combination of species distribution modelling informed by a participatory mapping approach, and summarising focus-group discussions which discussed the diversity of perspectives towards conservation action. Our study highlights the importance of considering a diversity of relationships to address coexistence issues in shared landscapes and suggests that the collaboration of different knowledge systems, through research co-construction, local knowledge and biotic interactions integrated in species distribution modelling, provides an important baseline to describe a shared landscape. Focus-group discussions highlighting the different stewardship perspectives among local actors contributed to contextualise spatial analysis showcasing the inherent political dimension of conservation needed to move from theory to practice.