Frontier Fellow 2025-2026:
Skylar Sidensol-Denero
Title: “Using Playback Speakers to Mitigate Human-Wildlife Conflict in Multi-use Landscapes”
As the climate changes drastically, animals and humans face a lack of resources in the land they inhabit, which continually forces them closer together at the border of rural communities.
This project focuses on the impacts of human disturbance due to this encroachment in multi-use land on African mammalian species to better prevent future human-wildlife conflicts (HWC). HWC causes not only species reduction and eventual extinction, but also psychological trauma and financial livelihood issues for pastoral communities involved in the conflict. This effort is relevant to all regions of the world experiencing HWC, but especially to marginalized rural communities in the Global South. Insight from these experiments will inform land use and management policies that are most compatible with protecting large, endangered African mammals in multi-use areas that often come into conflict with human economic resources. One of the most important parts of this project is developing and testing an autonomous playback system to deploy in the non-lethal management of wildlife species. Using camera trap data collected by Ph.D candidate Michael Kowalski, the intent is to use hierarchical statistical modeling to determine the effectiveness of these playback speakers in mitigating HWC and how ecological systems change when exposed to this. The goal is to concurrently use this data for a senior thesis project, to be completed in the spring quarter of 2026. This project is advised by Dr. Kilpatrick, Dr. Zavaleta, and Dr. Wilmers.