Narrative-Movement Framework (NMF): A socio-ecological systems (SES) approach to human narratives, animal movement, and coexistence in shared landscapes

1. Managing human-wildlife coexistence is essential for biodiversity conservation in places where humans and nonhumans compete for access to ecosystems. Viewing human-wildlife conflict as part of a complex web of positive and negative connections that exist between humans and nature is essential. 2. The field of socio-ecological systems (SES) seeks to understand these connections between human-specific systems (i.e., cultural, political, economic) and related ecological systems. We contribute to this growing literature with a coupled narrative-behavior SES framework, through which we present human environmental narratives as part of a cultural system that changes and is changed by altered animal movement behavior in shared landscapes. 3. The Narrative-Movement Framework (NMF) is built on a “people with nature” perspective of human-wildlife coexistence that can be used to understand connectivity and coexistence models. The NMF distinguishes itself from previous coupled ecological-cultural frameworks by placing the cultural system of human storytelling as a landscape-shaping factor, along with human-wildlife interactions and wildlife movement. 4. The NMF further encourages long-term thinking, and thinking with the complexity of target SES, to refine human-wildlife coexistence and conservation planning in ways that do not replace, but seek to complement relatively short-term and simplified approaches.