A project is underway to reintroduce wolves to a protected area. Wolves disappeared from this area many years ago, but local people still have memories of their presence. In such a situation, we know that the project will have human dimensions. Are local people happy about the return of wolves, or are they worried? Before…
A project is underway to reintroduce wolves to a protected area. Wolves disappeared from this area many years ago, but local people still have memories of their presence.
In such a situation, we know that the project will have human dimensions. Are local people happy about the return of wolves, or are they worried? Before the wolves disappeared, were they a source of pride for the community, or did people dislike having them around?
These questions, and the complexities behind them, are part of what we call the human dimensions of wildlife.
The answers could change the project. They might tell us where conflicts are likely, whom we need to involve, and even whether the proposed approach makes sense. To understand wildlife conservation, we sometimes need to spend as much time learning about people as we spend studying animals.
What Do the Human Dimensions of Wildlife Include?
Wildlife conservation is about more than animals and habitats. From returning wolves to protected areas to working with local communities, human dimensions help us understand how people’s values, experiences, and decisions influence conservation.
People who share their lives with wildlife
Wildlife lives in landscapes that people also use, remember, and make decisions about. A forest may be a habitat for bears and also a place where families collect firewood. A wetland may support migratory birds and provide income for fishers. Even a remote protected area is affected by decisions made in offices, villages, and cities.
Human dimensions of wildlife is a field concerned with these relationships. It examines how people think about wildlife, how they behave towards it, what they expect from its management, and how social conditions shape conservation decisions. Wildlife management has long drawn on this perspective, including in the work brought together by Decker, Riley, and Siemer (2012).
Values, livelihoods, and behaviour
Imagine two farmers who lose the same number of chickens to a wild predator. One may accept the loss as part of living near a protected area. The other may see it as evidence that conservation authorities do not care about local people. Their economic losses are similar, but their responses may be quite different.
To understand this difference, we might study their past experiences, income, beliefs, trust in institutions, and the options available to them. These are all human dimensions. They also include local traditions, social norms, laws, political influence, and the distribution of costs and benefits.
This is why interviewing people about whether they like a species is rarely enough. We need to understand what the species means in their daily lives.
Where conservation psychology fits
My academic background is in psychology, so I often begin with questions about perception, motivation, and behaviour. Why does someone protect an animal? Why does another person continue a harmful practice even when they know its ecological consequences? How do experiences with nature shape what people care about?
Conservation psychology helps us explore such questions, including the relationships between people and nature and the reasons behind conservation-related actions (Saunders, 2003). But psychology is only one part of the picture. Economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, and other disciplines help explain things that individual attitudes alone cannot.
A person may want to protect wildlife and still have very little power to change what happens to it.
What Human Dimensions Look Like in Conservation Practice
When living with birds creates problems
In one of our projects at AvayeBoom, we worked with beekeepers who were concerned about bee-eaters visiting their apiaries. From a bird conservation perspective, we wanted to reduce harm to the birds. But for a beekeeper, the immediate concern was the possible loss of bees and income.
It would have been easy to prepare an educational message about the ecological importance of bee-eaters. Instead, we tried to understand what beekeepers were experiencing and provide practical information and recommendations suited to their situation. We later followed up with participants to learn what they reported doing and how they perceived the conflict.
That follow-up was useful, although self-reported changes cannot, on their own, prove that our intervention caused an improvement. This is an important part of working with human dimensions: listening carefully, and being equally careful about what the evidence tells us.
When a bird becomes part of a community
At Arjan Wetland in southern Iran, we faced a different question. We wanted to select a bird that could help strengthen the relationship between local communities and the wetland.
The obvious choice might have been a rare or threatened bird. But rarity is not necessarily what makes a species meaningful to local people. We considered ecological, social, and cultural criteria, then selected the Ruddy Shelduck, locally known as Anghut, as a flagship species (Ebrahimi et al., 2024).
The project went on to involve schools, local activities, and opportunities for people to recognise the bird as part of the place where they live. We also monitored changes in people’s awareness and attitudes. These measures mattered alongside bird counts, because the aim was partly to build a relationship that could support conservation over time.
Rules, trust, and the power to decide
Some human dimensions are less visible than people’s feelings about animals. Consider a community that supports protecting a wetland, but has little confidence that conservation rules will be applied fairly. Or a ranger who understands a problem but has neither the resources nor the authority to address it.
In these situations, more awareness campaigns may achieve very little. The problem may lie in institutional arrangements, access to resources, or the history of relationships between different groups.
Research in conservation social science has shown how understanding such social and institutional conditions can improve conservation decisions (Bennett et al., 2017). In practice, it means asking who is involved in making decisions, who carries the costs, and who has a genuine opportunity to influence the outcome.
How Can We Include Human Dimensions in Conservation Projects?
Ask questions before designing the intervention
Human dimensions work does not always require a large research programme. Sometimes it begins with a few good questions and a willingness to hear answers we did not expect.
Who uses this area, and for what? Who benefits if the project succeeds? Who might lose something? What do people remember about earlier conservation attempts? Which people are usually invited to meetings, and which people are left out?
The methods depend on the question. Interviews and discussions can help us understand experiences and relationships. Surveys can show how common certain views are. Observation may reveal a gap between what people say and what they actually do. We can combine these with ecological data and revise the project as we learn more.
Most importantly, the findings should be allowed to change our plans. There is little value in asking people for their views if every decision has already been made.
Measure what changes for people
Conservation projects often report hectares protected, animals counted, or threats removed. These indicators are essential, but they may not explain why an intervention worked or whether its results will last.
We can also look at changes in behaviour, trust, local participation, attitudes, and the ability of institutions to continue the work. The choice of indicators should follow the project’s goals. A training event, for example, is evidence that people attended. It does not automatically show that their behaviour changed.
The wolf project we started with might succeed in releasing wolves and still struggle if it damages trust with neighbouring communities. It might also create new cooperation that was absent before. Both outcomes deserve to be understood, alongside what happens to the wolves themselves.
Wildlife conservation takes place in ecological systems, but its decisions are made and carried out by people. Understanding the human dimensions helps us design projects that make sense in the places where they will actually happen. And sometimes, it changes what we thought the conservation problem was in the first place.
References
Decker, D. J., Riley, S. J., & Siemer, W. F. (Eds.). (2012). Human Dimensions of Wildlife Management (2nd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press. https://doi.org/10.56021/9781421406541
Saunders, C. D. (2003). The emerging field of conservation psychology. Human Ecology Review, 10(2), 137–149. Read article
Bennett, N. J., et al. (2017). Conservation social science: Understanding and integrating human dimensions to improve conservation. Biological Conservation, 205, 93–108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2016.10.006
Ebrahimi, I., Dai, R., Kazemi, F., & Seifii, A. (2024). Selecting a flagship species for Arjan International Wetland in Iran. Journal of Wildlife and Biodiversity, 8(4), 364–383. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13835306