Human-Wildlife Interactions in the Tarangire Ecosystem

For millennia, people have lived alongside wildlife in the semi-arid savanna of the Tarangire Ecosystem (TE), northern Tanzania. The TE preserves one of the last long-distance wildlife migrations in Africa as well as a large and diverse human population. Initial wildlife conservation approaches, settlement politics, and changes in human livelihoods have created a fragmented coupled social-ecological system that currently faces serious challenges for both people and wildlife. In this introduction to the book “Tarangire: Human-Wildlife Coexistence in a Fragmented Ecosystem” we outline the environmental and climatic settings as well as the social, economic, and political structures and histories of the ecosystem. The combination of heterogeneous geology, variable rainfall, a historical focus on conserving dry-season ranges of wildlife, and an expanding human population brings people and wildlife in contact, often with negative consequences for humans and wildlife. From an anthropocentric perspective, large carnivores and elephants are perceived as particularly problematic. In this book, we adopt a social-ecological approach and present different perspectives on wildlife conservation in the TE as frameworks for integrated and effective solutions. The first section of the book addresses the human dimension in human-wildlife interactions, whereas the second section employs a more ecocentric perspective and summarizes the status and ecologies of key large-mammal populations in the TE. The third section addresses human-wildlife interactions explicitly with an eye towards solutions.