Living with wildlife: a review of advances in social-ecological analysis across landscapes

Context: An exciting research frontier is the intersection of wildlife ecology and social science. Associated research is embracing a spatial approach to integrating ecological and social data to investigate the complex relationships between wildlife and humans across landscapes. However, there is a lack of coherence on the status, current methodology, and potential future directions of this body of research to advance landscape analyses. Objectives: We provided a review of the current state of the science of social-ecological research and modeling of human-wildlife interactions across space, with a goal of compiling state-of-the-art approaches, methods, major findings, limitations, and future directions. Methods: We performed a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed journal articles published from January 2000 to August 2023. We synthesized methods, lessons learned, and key themes in the literature. Results: Synthesized findings pointed to the importance of spatial context in shaping wildlife and human attributes and their interactions, and the demonstrated value of adding social science data to contest past practices of oversimplifying the complex drivers of human-wildlife interactions. Challenges and limitations included spatial scale mismatches, the limits of assigning causality, misaligned terminology, and need for more in-depth and diverse social science data collection methods and frameworks. Conclusions: These studies highlighted the potential for social-ecological analyses to inform management through identification of key levers, scenario modeling, and avoidance of “panacea traps.” Our results also chart a path forward that calls for more extensive data integration, investigation of feedbacks, and multi-scale approaches to more deeply understand human-wildlife relationships across landscapes.