My pronouns are she/her
I am interested in mitigating human-wildlife conflicts with a focus on 'One Health' and 'One Welfare' perspectives. With increasing human encroachment on wildlife areas, human-carnivore conflicts (HCC) have intensified, leading to carnivore depredation of livestock and retaliatory killings by locals. These conflicts pose socioeconomic and conservation challenges, which could be crucially ameliorated by identifying key predictors of carnivore encounters at livestock enclosures (i.e., bomas). For example, free-ranging dogs, describing dogs that roam freely in villages, are an understudied influence on carnivore movements, behaviour, and decision-making at bomas.
My Master's project will thus explore how free-ranging dogs affect carnivore encounter rates at bomas in Central Kenya. By analysing camera trap data and considering socio-ecological factors outlined by the five main dimensions of conflict **(Beck et al., 2019)**, I aim to quantify how these dogs influence carnivore movements at the boma, filling a critical gap in the literature. Overall, this research aims to understand how free-ranging dogs influence local HCC at bomas, with implications for carnivore conservation and improved livestock production.
