The influence of human activity on predator-prey spatiotemporal overlap.

Despite growing evidence of widespread impacts of humans on animal behaviour, our understanding of how humans reshape species interactions remains limited. Here, we present a framework that draws on key concepts from behavioural and community ecology to outline four primary pathways by which humans can alter predator-prey spatiotemporal overlap. We suggest that predator-prey dyads can exhibit similar or opposite responses to human activity with distinct outcomes for predator diet, predation rates, population demography and trophic cascades. We demonstrate how to assess these behavioural response pathways with hypothesis testing, using temporal activity data for 178 predator-prey dyads from published camera trap studies on terrestrial mammals. We found evidence for each of the proposed pathways, revealing multiple patterns of human influence on predator-prey activity and overlap. Our framework and case study highlight current challenges, gaps, and advances in linking human activity to animal behaviour change and predator-prey dynamics. By using a hypothesis-driven approach to estimate the potential for altered species interactions, researchers can anticipate the ecological consequences of human activities on whole communities.

Contrasting patterns of risk from human and non-human predators shape temporal activity of prey.

Spatiotemporal variation in predation risk arises from interactions between landscape heterogeneity, predator densities and predator hunting mode, generating landscapes of fear for prey species that can have important effects on prey behaviour and ecosystem dynamics. As widespread apex predators, humans present a significant source of risk for hunted animal populations. Spatiotemporal patterns of risk from hunters can overlap or contrast with patterns of risk from other predators. Human infrastructure can also reshape spatial patterns of risk by facilitating or impeding hunter or predator movement, or deterring predators that are themselves wary of humans. We examined how anthropogenic and natural landscape features interact with hunting modes of rifle hunters and mountain lions Puma concolor to generate spatiotemporal patterns of risk for their primary prey. We explored the implications of human-modified landscapes of fear for Columbian black-tailed deer Odocoileus hemionus columbianus in Mendocino County, California. We used historical harvest records, hunter GPS trackers and camera trap records of mountain lions to model patterns of risk for deer. We then used camera traps to examine deer spatial and temporal activity patterns in response to this variation in risk. Hunters and mountain lions exhibited distinct, contrasting patterns of spatiotemporal activity. Risk from rifle hunters, who rely on long lines of sight, was highest in open grasslands and near roads and was confined to the daytime. Risk from mountain lions, an ambush predator, was highest in dense shrubland habitat, farther from developed areas, and during the night and crepuscular periods. Areas of human settlement provided a refuge from both hunters and mountain lions. We found no evidence that deer avoided risk in space at the scale of our observations, but deer adjusted their temporal activity patterns to reduce the risk of encounters with humans and mountain lions in areas of higher risk. Our study demonstrates that interactions between human infrastructure, habitat cover and predator hunting mode can result in distinct spatial patterns of predation risk from hunters and other predators that may lead to trade-offs for prey species. However, distinct diel activity patterns of predators may create vacant hunting domains that reduce costly trade-offs for prey. Our study highlights the importance of temporal partitioning as a mechanism of predation risk avoidance.

Disturbance type and species life history predict mammal responses to humans.

Human activity and land use change impact every landscape on Earth, driving declines in many animal species while benefiting others. Species ecological and life history traits may predict success in human-dominated landscapes such that only species with "winning" combinations of traits will persist in disturbed environments. However, this link between species traits and successful coexistence with humans remains obscured by the complexity of anthropogenic disturbances and variability among study systems. We compiled detection data for 24 mammal species from 61 populations across North America to quantify the effects of (1) the direct presence of people and (2) the human footprint (landscape modification) on mammal occurrence and activity levels. Thirty-three percent of mammal species exhibited a net negative response (i.e., reduced occurrence or activity) to increasing human presence and/or footprint across populations, whereas 58% of species were positively associated with increasing disturbance. However, apparent benefits of human presence and footprint tended to decrease or disappear at higher disturbance levels, indicative of thresholds in mammal species' capacity to tolerate disturbance or exploit human-dominated landscapes. Species ecological and life history traits were strong predictors of their responses to human footprint, with increasing footprint favoring smaller, less carnivorous, faster-reproducing species. The positive and negative effects of human presence were distributed more randomly with respect to species trait values, with apparent winners and losers across a range of body sizes and dietary guilds. Differential responses by some species to human presence and human footprint highlight the importance of considering these two forms of human disturbance separately when estimating anthropogenic impacts on wildlife. Our approach provides insights into the complex mechanisms through which human activities shape mammal communities globally, revealing the drivers of the loss of larger predators in human-modified landscapes.

Effects of the hippopotamus on the chemistry and ecology of a changing watershed.

Cross-boundary transfers of nutrients can profoundly shape the ecology of recipient systems. The common hippopotamus, Hippopotamus amphibius, is a significant vector of such subsidies from terrestrial to river ecosystems. We compared river pools with high and low densities of H. amphibius to determine how H. amphibius subsidies shape the chemistry and ecology of aquatic communities. Our study watershed, like many in sub-Saharan Africa, has been severely impacted by anthropogenic water abstraction reducing dry-season flow to zero. We conducted observations for multiple years over wet and dry seasons to identify how hydrological variability influences the impacts of H. amphibius During the wet season, when the river was flowing, we detected no differences in water chemistry and nutrient parameters between pools with high and low densities of H. amphibius Likewise, the diversity and abundance of fish and aquatic insect communities were indistinguishable. During the dry season, however, high-density H. amphibius pools differed drastically in almost all measured attributes of water chemistry and exhibited depressed fish and insect diversity and fish abundance compared with low-density H. amphibius pools. Scaled up to the entire watershed, we estimate that H. amphibius in this hydrologically altered watershed reduces dry-season fish abundance and indices of gamma-level diversity by 41% and 16%, respectively, but appears to promote aquatic invertebrate diversity. Widespread human-driven shifts in hydrology appear to redefine the role of H. amphibius, altering their influence on ecosystem diversity and functioning in a fashion that may be more severe than presently appreciated.

An ecological framework for contextualizing carnivore-livestock conflict.

Carnivore predation on livestock is a complex management and policy challenge, yet it is also intrinsically an ecological interaction between predators and prey. Human-wildlife interactions occur in socioecological systems in which human and environmental processes are closely linked. However, underlying human-wildlife conflict and key to unpacking its complexity are concrete and identifiable ecological mechanisms that lead to predation events. To better understand how ecological theory accords with interactions between wild predators and domestic prey, we developed a framework to describe ecological drivers of predation on livestock. We based this framework on foundational ecological theory and current research on interactions between predators and domestic prey. We used this framework to examine ecological mechanisms (e.g., density-mediated effects, behaviorally mediated effects, and optimal foraging theory) through which specific management interventions operate, and we analyzed the ecological determinants of failure and success of management interventions in 3 case studies: snow leopards (Panthera uncia), wolves (Canis lupus), and cougars (Puma concolor). The varied, context-dependent successes and failures of the management interventions in these case studies demonstrated the utility of using an ecological framework to ground research and management of carnivore-livestock conflict. Mitigation of human-wildlife conflict appears to require an understanding of how fundamental ecological theories work within domestic predator-prey systems.

Un Marco de Trabajo Ecológico para Contextualizar el Conflicto Carnívoro - Ganado Resumen La depredación del ganado por carnívoros es un reto complejo para el manejo y las políticas, a pesar de que es intrínsecamente una interacción ecológica entre depredadores y presas. Las interacciones entre humanos y la fauna ocurren en sistemas socio-ecológicos en los que los humanos y los procesos ambientales están conectados estrechamente. Sin embargo, el conflicto humano - fauna subyacente y la clave para desenredar su complejidad son mecanismos ecológicos complejos e identificables que resultan en eventos de depredación. Para tener un mejor entendimiento sobre cómo la teoría ecológica armoniza con las interacciones entre los depredadores silvestres y la presa doméstica, desarrollamos un marco de trabajo para describir las causantes ecológicas de la depredación del ganado. Basamos este marco de trabajo en las principales teorías ecológicas y las investigaciones actuales sobre las interacciones entre los depredadores y las presas domésticas. Usamos este marco de trabajo para examinar los mecanismos ecológicos (es decir, los efectos mediados por la densidad, los efectos mediados por el comportamiento, y la teoría del forrajeo óptimo) mediante los cuales operan ciertas intervenciones específicas de manejo y analizamos las determinantes ecológicas del fracaso y el éxito de las intervenciones de manejo en tres estudios de caso: el leopardo de las nieves (Panthera uncia), el lobo (Canis lupus), y el puma (Puma concolor). Los éxitos y fracasos variados y dependientes del contexto que sufrieron las intervenciones de manejo en estos estudios de caso demostraron la utilidad del uso de un marco de trabajo ecológico para aterrizar la investigación y el manejo del conflicto carnívoro - ganado. La mitigación del conflicto humano - fauna parece requerir de un entendimiento sobre cómo funcionan las teorías ecológicas fundamentales dentro del sistema doméstico depredador - presa.

Human health alters the sustainability of fishing practices in East Africa.

Understanding feedbacks between human and environmental health is critical for the millions who cope with recurrent illness and rely directly on natural resources for sustenance. Although studies have examined how environmental degradation exacerbates infectious disease, the effects of human health on our use of the environment remains unexplored. Human illness is often tacitly assumed to reduce human impacts on the environment. By this logic, ill people reduce the time and effort that they put into extractive livelihoods and, thereby, their impact on natural resources. We followed 303 households living on Lake Victoria, Kenya over four time points to examine how illness influenced fishing. Using fixed effect conditional logit models to control for individual-level and time-invariant factors, we analyzed the effect of illness on fishing effort and methods. Illness among individuals who listed fishing as their primary occupation affected their participation in fishing. However, among active fishers, we found limited evidence that illness reduced fishing effort. Instead, ill fishers shifted their fishing methods. When ill, fishers were more likely to use methods that were illegal, destructive, and concentrated in inshore areas but required less travel and energy. Ill fishers were also less likely to fish using legal methods that are physically demanding, require travel to deep waters, and are considered more sustainable. By altering the physical capacity and outlook of fishers, human illness shifted their effort, their engagement with natural resources, and the sustainability of their actions. These findings show a previously unexplored pathway through which poor human health may negatively impact the environment.

Climate mediates the success of migration strategies in a marine predator.

Individual behavioural specialisation has far-reaching effects on fitness and population persistence. Theory predicts that unconditional site fidelity, that is fidelity to a site independent of past outcome, provides a fitness advantage in unpredictable environments. However, the benefits of alternative site fidelity strategies driving intraspecific variation remain poorly understood and have not been evaluated in different environmental contexts. We show that contrary to expectation, strong and weak site fidelity strategies in migratory northern elephant seals performed similarly over 10 years, but the success of each strategy varied interannually and was strongly mediated by climate conditions. Strong fidelity facilitated stable energetic rewards and low risk, while weak fidelity facilitated high rewards and high risk. Weak fidelity outperformed strong fidelity in anomalous climate conditions, suggesting that the evolutionary benefits of site fidelity may be upended by increasing environmental variability. We highlight how individual behavioural specialisation may modulate the adaptive capacity of species to climate change.

Diverse effects of the common hippopotamus on plant communities and soil chemistry.

The ecological importance of the common hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) in aquatic ecosystems is becoming increasingly well known. These unique megaherbivores are also likely to have a formative influence on the terrestrial ecosystems in which they forage. In this study, we employed a novel exclosure design to exclude H. amphibius from experimental plots on near-river grasslands. Our three-year implementation of this experiment revealed a substantial influence of H. amphibius removal on both plant communities and soil chemistry. H. amphibius significantly reduced grassland canopy height, increased the leafiness of common grasses, reduced woody plant abundance and size, and increased the concentrations of several soil elements. Many of the soil chemistry changes that we experimentally induced by exclusion of H. amphibius were mirrored in the soil chemistry differences between naturally occurring habitats of frequent (grazing lawns) and infrequent (shrub forest) use by H. amphibius and other grazing herbivores. In contrast to existing hypotheses regarding grazing species, we found that H. amphibius had little effect on local plant species richness. Simultaneous observations of exclosures designed to remove all large herbivores revealed that H. amphibius removal had ecologically significant impacts, but that the removal of all species of large herbivores generated more pronounced impacts than the removal of H. amphibius alone. In aggregate, our results suggest that H. amphibius have myriad effects on their terrestrial habitats that likely improve the quality of forage available for other herbivores. We suggest that ongoing losses of this vulnerable megaherbivore are likely to cause significant ecological change.

Precipitation alters interactions in a grassland ecological community.

Climate change is transforming precipitation regimes world-wide. Changes in precipitation regimes are known to have powerful effects on plant productivity, but the consequences of these shifts for the dynamics of ecological communities are poorly understood. This knowledge gap hinders our ability to anticipate and mitigate the impacts of climate change on biodiversity. Precipitation may affect fauna through direct effects on physiology, behaviour or demography, through plant-mediated indirect effects, or by modifying interactions among species. In this paper, we examined the response of a semi-arid ecological community to a fivefold change in precipitation over 7 years. We examined the effects of precipitation on the dynamics of a grassland ecosystem in central California from 2007 to 2013. We conducted vegetation surveys, pitfall trapping of invertebrates, visual surveys of lizards and capture-mark-recapture surveys of rodents on 30 plots each year. We used structural equation modelling to evaluate the direct, indirect and modifying effects of precipitation on plants, ants, beetles, orthopterans, kangaroo rats, ground squirrels and lizards. We found pervasive effects of precipitation on the ecological community. Although precipitation increased plant biomass, direct effects on fauna were often stronger than plant-mediated effects. In addition, precipitation altered the sign or strength of consumer-resource and facilitative interactions among the faunal community such that negative or neutral interactions became positive or vice versa with increasing precipitation. These findings indicate that precipitation influences ecological communities in multiple ways beyond its recognized effects on primary productivity. Stochastic variation in precipitation may weaken the average strength of biotic interactions over time, thereby increasing ecosystem stability and resilience to climate change.

Hunting, food subsidies, and mesopredator release: the dynamics of crop-raiding baboons in a managed landscape.

The establishment of protected areas or parks has become an important tool for wildlife conservation. However, frequent occurrences of human-wildlife conflict at the edges of these parks can undermine their conservation goals. Many African protected areas have experienced concurrent declines of apex predators alongside increases in both baboon abundance and the density of humans living near the park boundary. Baboons then take excursions outside of the park to raid crops for food, conflicting with the human population. We model the interactions of mesopredators (baboons), apex predators, and shared prey in the park to analyze how four components affect the proportion of time that mesopredators choose to crop-raid: (1) the presence of apex predators; (2) nutritional quality of the crops; (3) mesopredator "shyness" about leaving the park; and (4) human hunting of mesopredators. We predict that the presence of apex predators in the park is the most effective method for controlling mesopredator abundance, and hence significantly reduces their impact on crops. Human hunting of mesopredators is less effective as it only occurs during crop-raiding excursions. Furthermore, making crops less attractive, for instance by planting crops further from the park boundary or farming less nutritional crops, can reduce the amount of time mesopredators crop-raid.

Economic valuation of subsistence harvest of wildlife in Madagascar.

Wildlife consumption can be viewed as an ecosystem provisioning service (the production of a material good through ecological functioning) because of wildlife's ability to persist under sustainable levels of harvest. We used the case of wildlife harvest and consumption in northeastern Madagascar to identify the distribution of these services to local households and communities to further our understanding of local reliance on natural resources. We inferred these benefits from demand curves built with data on wildlife sales transactions. On average, the value of wildlife provisioning represented 57% of annual household cash income in local communities from the Makira Natural Park and Masoala National Park, and harvested areas produced an economic return of U.S.$0.42 ha(-1) · year(-1). Variability in value of harvested wildlife was high among communities and households with an approximate 2 orders of magnitude difference in the proportional value of wildlife to household income. The imputed price of harvested wildlife and its consumption were strongly associated (p< 0.001), and increases in price led to reduced harvest for consumption. Heightened monitoring and enforcement of hunting could increase the costs of harvesting and thus elevate the price and reduce consumption of wildlife. Increased enforcement would therefore be beneficial to biodiversity conservation but could limit local people's food supply. Specifically, our results provide an estimate of the cost of offsetting economic losses to local populations from the enforcement of conservation policies. By explicitly estimating the welfare effects of consumed wildlife, our results may inform targeted interventions by public health and development specialists as they allocate sparse funds to support regions, households, or individuals most vulnerable to changes in access to wildlife.

Economic and geographic drivers of wildlife consumption in rural Africa.

The harvest of wildlife for human consumption is valued at several billion dollars annually and provides an essential source of meat for hundreds of millions of rural people living in poverty. This harvest is also considered among the greatest threats to biodiversity throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Economic development is often proposed as an essential first step to win-win solutions for poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation by breaking rural reliance on wildlife. However, increases in wealth may accelerate consumption and extend the scale and efficiency of wildlife harvest. Our ability to assess the likelihood of these two contrasting outcomes and to design approaches that simultaneously consider poverty and biodiversity loss is impeded by a weak understanding of the direction and shape of their interaction. Here, we present results of economic and wildlife use surveys conducted in 2,000 households from 96 settlements in Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, and Madagascar. We examine the individual and interactive roles of wealth, relative food prices, market access, and opportunity costs of time spent hunting on household rates of wildlife consumption. Despite great differences in biogeographic, social, and economic aspects of our study sites, we found a consistent relationship between wealth and wildlife consumption. Wealthier households consume more bushmeat in settlements nearer urban areas, but the opposite pattern is observed in more isolated settlements. Wildlife hunting and consumption increase when alternative livelihoods collapse, but this safety net is an option only for those people living near harvestable wildlife.

Benefits of wildlife consumption to child nutrition in a biodiversity hotspot.

Terrestrial wildlife is the primary source of meat for hundreds of millions of people throughout the developing world. Despite widespread human reliance on wildlife for food, the impact of wildlife depletion on human health remains poorly understood. Here we studied a prospective longitudinal cohort of 77 preadolescent children (under 12 y of age) in rural northeastern Madagascar and show that consuming more wildlife was associated with significantly higher hemoglobin concentrations. Our empirical models demonstrate that removing access to wildlife would induce a 29% increase in the numbers of children suffering from anemia and a tripling of anemia cases among children in the poorest households. The well-known progression from anemia to future disease demonstrates the powerful and far-reaching effects of lost wildlife access on a variety of human health outcomes, including cognitive, motor, and physical deficits. Loss of access to wildlife could arise either from the diligent enforcement of existing conservation policy or from unbridled unsustainable harvest, leading to depletion. Conservation enforcement would enact a more rapid restriction of resources, but self-depletion would potentially lead, albeit more slowly, both to irrevocable local wildlife extinctions and loss of the harvested resource. Our research quantifies costs of reduced access to wildlife for a rural community in Madagascar and illuminates pathways that may broadly link reduced natural resource access to declines in childhood health.

Social-ecological predictors of spotted hyena navigation through a shared landscape.

Human-wildlife interactions are increasing in severity due to climate change and proliferating urbanization. Regions where human infrastructure and activity are rapidly densifying or newly appearing constitute novel environments in which wildlife must learn to coexist with people, thereby serving as ideal case studies with which to infer future human-wildlife interactions in shared landscapes. As a widely reviled and behaviorally plastic apex predator, the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) is a model species for understanding how large carnivores navigate these human-caused 'landscapes of fear' in a changing world. Using high-resolution GPS collar data, we applied resource selection functions and step selection functions to assess spotted hyena landscape navigation and fine-scale movement decisions in relation to social-ecological features in a rapidly developing region comprising two protected areas: Lake Nakuru National Park and Soysambu Conservancy, Kenya. We then used camera trap imagery and Barrier Behavior Analysis (BaBA) to further examine hyena interactions with barriers. Our results show that environmental factors, linear infrastructure, human-carnivore conflict hotspots, and human tolerance were all important predictors for landscape-scale resource selection by hyenas, while human experience elements were less important for fine-scale hyena movement decisions. Hyena selection for these characteristics also changed seasonally and across land management types. Camera traps documented an exceptionally high number of individual spotted hyenas (234) approaching the national park fence at 16 sites during the study period, and BaBA results suggested that hyenas perceive protected area boundaries' semi-permeable electric fences as risky but may cross them out of necessity. Our findings highlight that the ability of carnivores to flexibly respond within human-caused landscapes of fear may be expressed differently depending on context, scale, and climatic factors. These results also point to the need to incorporate societal factors into multiscale analyses of wildlife movement to effectively plan for human-wildlife coexistence.

Hunting mode and habitat selection mediate the success of human hunters.

BACKGROUND: As a globally widespread apex predator, humans have unprecedented lethal and non-lethal effects on prey populations and ecosystems. Yet compared to non-human predators, little is known about the movement ecology of human hunters, including how hunting behavior interacts with the environment. METHODS: We characterized the hunting modes, habitat selection, and harvest success of 483 rifle hunters in California using high-resolution GPS data. We used Hidden Markov Models to characterize fine-scale movement behavior, and k-means clustering to group hunters by hunting mode, on the basis of their time spent in each behavioral state. Finally, we used Resource Selection Functions to quantify patterns of habitat selection for successful and unsuccessful hunters of each hunting mode. RESULTS: Hunters exhibited three distinct and successful hunting modes ("coursing", "stalking", and "sit-and-wait"), with coursings as the most successful strategy. Across hunting modes, there was variation in patterns of selection for roads, topography, and habitat cover, with differences in habitat use of successful and unsuccessful hunters across modes. CONCLUSIONS: Our study indicates that hunters can successfully employ a diversity of harvest strategies, and that hunting success is mediated by the interacting effects of hunting mode and landscape features. Such results highlight the breadth of human hunting modes, even within a single hunting technique, and lend insight into the varied ways that humans exert predation pressure on wildlife.

Biodiversity monitoring for a just planetary future.

Data that influence policy and major investment decisions risk entrenching social and political inequities.

Searching for sustainability: are assessments of wildlife harvests behind the times?

The unsustainable harvest of wildlife is a major threat to global biodiversity and to the millions of people who depend on wildlife for food and income. Past research has called attention to the fact that commonly used methods to evaluate the sustainability of wildlife hunting perform poorly, yet these methods remain in popular use today. Here, we conduct a systematic review of empirical sustainability assessments to quantify the use of sustainability indicators in the scientific literature and highlight associations between analytical methods and their outcomes. We find that indicator type, continent of study, species body mass, taxonomic group and socio-economic status of study site are important predictors of the probability of reported sustainability. The most common measures of sustainability include population growth models, the Robinson & Redford (1991) model and population trends through time. Indicators relying on population-specific biological data are most often used in North America and Europe, while cruder estimates are more often used in Africa, Latin America and Oceania. Our results highlight both the uncertainty and lack of uniformity in sustainability science. Given our urgent need to conserve both wildlife and the food security of rural peoples around the world, improvements in sustainability indicators are of utmost importance.

Predicting and detecting reciprocity between indirect ecological interactions and evolution.

Living nature can be thought of as a tapestry, defined not only by its constituent parts but also by how these parts are woven together. The weaving of this tapestry is a metaphor for species interactions, which can be divided into three broad classes: competitive, mutualistic, and consumptive. Direct interactions link together as more complex networks, for example, the joining of consumptive interactions into food webs. Food web dynamics are driven, in turn, by changes in the abundances of web members, whose numbers or biomass respond to bottom-up (resource limitation) and top-down (consumer limitation) forcing. The relative strengths of top-down and bottom-up forcing on the abundance of a given web member depend on its ecological context, including its topological position within the food web. Top-down effects by diverse consumers are nearly ubiquitous, in many cases influencing the structure and operation of ecosystems. While the ecological effects of such interactions are well known, far less is known of their evolutionary consequences. In this essay, we describe sundry consequences of these interaction chains on species and ecosystem processes, explain several known or suspected evolutionary effects of consumer-induced interaction chains, and identify areas where reciprocity between ecology and evolution involving the indirect effects of consumer-prey interaction chains might be further explored.

Quantifying past and present connectivity illuminates a rapidly changing landscape for the African elephant.

There is widespread concern about impacts of land-use change on connectivity among animal and plant populations, but those impacts are difficult to quantify. Moreover, lack of knowledge regarding ecosystems before fragmentation may obscure appropriate conservation targets. We use occurrence and population genetic data to contrast connectivity for a long-lived mega-herbivore over historical and contemporary time frames. We test whether (i) historical gene flow is predicted by persistent landscape features rather than human settlement, (ii) contemporary connectivity is most affected by human settlement and (iii) recent gene flow estimates show the effects of both factors. We used 16 microsatellite loci to estimate historical and recent gene flow among African elephant (Loxodonta africana) populations in seven protected areas in Tanzania, East Africa. We used historical gene flow (FST and G'ST ) to test and optimize models of historical landscape resistance to movement. We inferred contemporary landscape resistance from elephant resource selection, assessed via walking surveys across ~15 400 km(2) of protected and unprotected lands. We used assignment-based recent gene flow estimates to optimize and test the contemporary resistance model, and to test a combined historical and contemporary model. We detected striking changes in connectivity. Historical connectivity among elephant populations was strongly influenced by slope but not human settlement, whereas contemporary connectivity was influenced most by human settlement. Recent gene flow was strongly influenced by slope but was also correlated with contemporary resistance. Inferences across multiple timescales can better inform conservation efforts on large and complex landscapes, while mitigating the fundamental problem of shifting baselines in conservation.