Ecotourism benefit sharing strategies

UG will map and classify land-use types around the Greater Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem, including survey data on the key economic indicators for individual tourism operators. Wild dogs will be used as model species to elucidate the values, trade-offs and options for balancing wildlife-based tourism with depredation on livestock. NTNU, TAWIRI and NINA will conduct an analysis of predation risk of livestock by wild dogs into encounter and kill rates by relating resource selection of wild dogs (subtask 2.2.1) and livestock densities (Task 4.5) with kill sites of livestock (Hebblewhite et al. 2005). The distribution of individual tourist operations will be overlapped with (de)predation risk maps to assess strategies for sustainable ecotourism initiatives. Wildebeest and zebra will be used by UG as model species to investigate the conditions in which migratory species may provide ecotourism revenues. Pilot data shows that cortisol, progesterone, and nitrogen15 isotopes vary over the tail-hair length and provide reliable metrics of stress, reproduction, and starvation cycles. Every 18 months TAWIRI will recapture the GPS collared animals (subtask 2.2.1) and collect hair samples. By combining the time-sequence of hair samples with GPS data UG, NTNU and NINA will be able to determine if the behaviour of the animal is due to stress (high cortisol). These two exemplars enable UG, NINA, NTNU and TAWIRI to determine if wildlife are responding to particular management strategies besides their natural biological requirements, and its consequences and options for improved revenues from ecotourism on village lands and other management areas.