IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature

Making extensive use of real-life examples and case studies, combined with a strong practical element, this training course aims to provide African wildlife managers and local residents with the basic tools needed for effective community-based HEC management. The course material has been developed by some of Africa’s leading experts on HEC mitigation and covers all the essential topics in five comprehensive modules. Taken together these modules are designed to equip HEC mitigation practitioners with the knowledge and skills needed to effectively manage conflict at the site level.

This guide is primarily intended to give support to protected area managers, officials from wildlife authorities, technical personnel or researchers from conservation or agricultural agencies involved in human-elephant conflict management.

It proposes a series of sequential, logical steps to help managers arrive at optimal management strategies suited to their particular circumstances. The DSS is a first attempt to bring both applied research and "conventional wisdom" into the active management of a HEC problem in field situations.

This tool is designed to provide basic training in the collection of data on human-elephant conflict. This is necessary to ensure that the data collected are of consistent quality and reliable enough for summary and analysis.

 Aims and Objectives:

• To present options for quantifying human-elephant conflict problems.
• To achieve consistency and quality of data by standardizing data collection and analysis.
• To allow for valid comparisons to be made about levels of human - elephant conflict both within and across different biogeographical regions of Africa.
• To facilitate the management of the problem at a local level
• To allow for valid comparisons of the severity of the problem to be made between sites which differ in their physical characteristics
• To limit the the extent of conflict situations by identifying predictors of HEC.