Syllabus

PFS0154 Global perspectives on adaptive wildlife management, 7.5 Credits

Subjects

Education cycle

Grading scale

Language

Prior knowledge

Objectives

The aim of the course is to provide students with a broader, multidisciplinary, understanding of adaptive and sustainable wildlife management in northern and southern hemisphere systems. The main underlying objective is to train the students’ critical, analytical and out-of-the-box thinking. As a result, they should be better adapted to solving the world’s future wildlife management issues.

Learning outcomes: Upon completion of the course the student should be able to:

• Describe the principles of adaptive management and co-management

• Have a good understanding of some of the core concepts and theories underlying adaptive wildlife management (e.g. governance, conflict mitigation, population and behavioral ecology), originating from different disciplines, including political science and ecology

• Explain and contrast some of the main wildlife management issues in the Scandinavian and South African context

• Discuss and analyze adaptive wildlife management problems at a more general, conceptual level, and develop solutions for these issues beyond species-specific or systems-specific boundaries

• Reflect on the value of an interdisciplinary research approach

• Present & communicate their research at different levels of education (primary school, MSc-level, PhD level), in a multi-cultural setting and to different stakeholders (scientists and managers)

Content

The course will have three mandatory parts; Part I will be at SLU in Umeå, Part II in South Africa, and Part III again at SLU in Umeå.

Part I will exist of one week during December. This will include a 1 day meeting in Umeå, where students will be informed about and prepared for the field trip. The remaining days of Part I, the students will focus on background reading for the course and preparing a talk about their PhD research, and how it relates to the adaptive management framework. For this task one European student will be teamed-up with one South African student with which they will have to interact during Part I over Skype and prepare a co-presentation that they will give in South Africa.

Part II consists of a 16-day fieldtrip to South Africa in January. This part of the course will be based at the Nsasani Trust educational camp (www.nsasani.co.za) in Skukuza, Kruger National Park. The Nsasani Trust is also a co-organizer of the course. This part of the course will cover a series of themes, focused on comparing Scandinavian and South African wildlife management approaches and issues; e.g., ungulate management (e.g., moose vs. elephant management), large carnivore management (e.g., wolf vs. jackal management), conflicts around land use and local communities (e.g., mining and land/green grabbing), and issues around illegal harvest or culling. Students will be able to learn about these themes in detail and critically analyze them through a series of lectures by the course organizers, local researchers and conservation managers, through diverse group exercises, through workshop-type interactions with local managers and scientists, and through field excursions to a diversity of wildlife systems. Exercises include: (1) presentation of own PhD work, (2) multiple day group exercise where students will critically analyze an adaptive management issue while being able to access literature and interview local lecturers, managers and scientists, (3) present the outcome of this group work to scientists and managers (4) present the outcome at a local primary/secondary school. Throughout all exercises we will team-up European and South African students.

Part III takes place in Umeå in February. The students will be asked to reflect on the field trip and outline what they have learned from this course, in terms of generic skills, but also in terms of contrasting southern versus northern hemisphere adaptive management. Moreover, in groups of 3-4, students will be asked to develop and give a half-day teaching activity within the MSc course Human Dimensions of Fish and Wildlife Management (given at the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Environmental Studies). This should be in the form of interactive teaching forms. This teaching activity will be based on the group exercise that they did in South Africa and they will have some additional preparation time while back in Sweden.

For more detailed information, please visit www.slu.se/ecos-courses

Additional information

Responsible department

Department of Wildlife, Fish, & Environmental Studies