摘要：Conflict with humans poses one of the greatest threats to the persistence and survival of all wildlife. In the CapePeninsula, South Africa, human–baboon conflict levels remain high despite substantial investment by conservation authoritiesin a variety of mitigation measures. Here we explore how spatial ecology can inform wildlife managers on the extent and severityof both current and projected human–baboon conflict. We apply conservative and generous densities—2.3 and 5.9 baboons/km2—to hypothetical landscape management scenarios to estimate whether the chacma baboon (Papio ursinus) population in theCape Peninsula is currently overabundant. We correlate conflict indices with spatial variables to explain intertroop differencesin conflict levels. We investigate how an understanding of key elements of baboon ecology, including sleeping-site characteristicsand intertroop territoriality, can direct management efforts and mitigate conflict. Our findings suggest that the current populationof 475 baboons is below even the most conservative density estimate and that the area could potentially sustain up to 799baboons. Conflict levels correlated positively with the loss of access to low-lying land through habitat transformation (Pearsonr = 0.77, p = 0.015, n = 9 troops), and negatively with the distance of sleeping sites from the urban edge (Pearson r = 0.81, p =0.001, n = 9 troops). Despite the availability of suitable sleeping sites elsewhere, more than half of all troops slept <500 m fromthe urban edge, resulting in increased spatial overlap and conflict with residents. Evidence for intertroop territoriality suggestedthat troop removal to mitigate human–baboon conflict would only be a short-term solution because neighboring troops arepredicted to usurp the vacated home range and thus perpetuate the cycle of conflict. Together these findings suggest that anunderstanding of wildlife spatial ecology in a semi-urban context can be used to identify current and predicted landscape-levelcauses of human–baboon conflict. This information can be used to formulate sustainable long-term landscape management andconservation plans so that less costly and controversial direct wildlife management is required, and so ultimately fewer animalsand humans suffer the costs of conflict
