Conservation Conflicts Across Africa

TLDR

Conservation hotspots frequently overlap with densely populated regions, raising concerns about human–wildlife conflicts. The study aimed to test whether this overlap between conservation importance and human density holds across sub‑Saharan Africa using 1° resolution data. The authors analyzed 1° grid data across sub‑Saharan Africa to assess the relationship between human density and species richness. Across Africa, human density is positively correlated with species richness of birds, mammals, snakes, and amphibians—including widespread, endemic, and threatened species—and this relationship, which peaks at intermediate productivity, is projected to persist with future population growth, implying that conservation and development conflicts cannot be easily avoided because many densely inhabited cells contain unique species.

Abstract

There is increasing evidence that areas of outstanding conservation importance may coincide with dense human settlement or impact. We tested the generality of these findings using 1°-resolution data for sub-Saharan Africa. We find that human population density is positively correlated with species richness of birds, mammals, snakes, and amphibians. This association holds for widespread, narrowly endemic, and threatened species and looks set to persist in the face of foreseeable population growth. Our results contradict earlier expectations of low conflict based on the idea that species richness decreases and human impact increases with primary productivity. We find that across Africa, both variables instead exhibit unimodal relationships with productivity. Modifying priority-setting to take account of human density shows that, at this scale, conflicts between conservation and development are not easily avoided, because many densely inhabited grid cells contain species found nowhere else.