DOI: 10.5061/dryad.9w0vt4bnd
title: Dataset of: Community perspectives on the prospect of lion (Panthera leo) reintroduction to Comoé National Park, Côte d’Ivoire (West Africa)

description: The civil war in Côte d’Ivoire led to a hike in human disturbances and the
 extirpation of the African lion (Panthera leo) from the Comoé National
 Park (CNP). After the war, many efforts have been made to restore this
 ecosystem and management is considering the reintroduction of lions. In
 participatory management with people at the center of conservation, there
 is a need to discuss with communities the initiatives affecting their
 livelihoods. We assessed the acceptance of lion reintroduction by the
 local communities; through semi-structured questionnaires to 307 volunteer
 participants in surrounding 23 villages. Most respondents had knowledge of
 lions from CNP (93%, n=286). A generalized linear model (GLM) revealed
 that sex, profession, perceived benefits and risks, and an
 appreciation of the current management system are the main significant
 determinants for the acceptance of lion reintroduction in CNP.  A
 large majority (73%, n=223) were in favor of the lion reintroduction with
 significant variance among socio-professional categories. The majority of
 respondents (81%, n=250) acknowledged having coexisted with lions, with
 previous lion conflicts reported by 20% (n = 61), and a willingness to
 coexist in the future by 74% (n = 227). More than 84% (n=260) believed
 that there would be benefits associated with lion reintroduction to CNP
 and 53% (n=162) believed that the potential benefits would be greater than
 the possible risks associated with lions. Most respondents (88%; n=270)
 confirmed the possibility of taking precautions to prevent future lion
 attacks. While only 42% (n = 129) of respondents felt that current
 management was participatory, most of them felt that it was acceptable
 (83%; n = 254). Our data shows a large degree of lion support, positive
 perceptions, and willingness to coexist with lions in the future. These
 results form part of a fundamental step in the direction for ethical
 reintroduction, as described by the IUCN reintroduction specialist group.
 We recommend the improvement of the involvement of indigenous communities
 in potential reintroduction of lions, especially the pastoralists, and the
 sharing of any associated benefits.
description: # Dataset of the article "Community perspectives on the prospect of
 lion (Panthera leo) reintroduction to Comoé National Park, Côte d’Ivoire
 (West Africa)"
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9w0vt4bnd](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9w0vt4bnd) Preprint of the paper is downloadable at DOI: 10.22541/au.167303812.29090197/v1 Give a brief summary of dataset contents, contextualized in experimental procedures and results. ## Description of the data and file structure The datasets were collected in 23 surrounding villages of Comoé National Park from September to November 2021. 307 respondents were interviewed through semi-structured questionnaires. All respondents were volunteer participants and we anonymized them before data processing data analysis.   The dataset included: 1)      Worksheet “Database”, which contains: Interviewee (E1, E2, E3 …), Sex, ethnic groups and profession of respondents, personal control, perceived benefits, perceived risks, management system and acceptance (Yes or No) for each respondent. These data were used to determine the acceptance of lion reintroduction and determinants of this acceptance among respondents. For columns E through I, we used two levels as you can see (yes or no) to the question we addressed to respondents. In our case, all questions were inspired from Zajac et al. (2012) * For example, the Personal control in column E, was assessed through the following question: “Do you have the ability to protect your property from future reintroduced lion?”. Response Yes or No was recorded * For Perceived benefits in column F, the question was: ‘Do you think there will be benefits related to lion reintroduction project?”. * For Perceived risks in column G, the question was: “Do you think there will be risks related to lion reintroduction project?” * For Management system, we asked respondents their appreciation of the current management system with two possibilities (Acceptable or Bad) * For Acceptance, the question was: “Do you agree with return of lion in the Comoé National Park?”. 2)      Worksheet “Stats1”, which included the tabulation of percentages of agree and disagree responses from respondents ranged in different ethnic groups and professions. In this worksheet, we tabulated Kh² test to assess the difference between ethnic groups and socio-professional categories. 3)      Worksheet “Stats2”, which contains agree and disagree percentages of respondents per village 4)      Worksheet “AICc Table” contains the table of AICc values, model name, k (number of parameters), Delta AICc, Model likelihood, and AICc weight 5)      The worksheet “GLM Codes” contains the scripts used to run the Generalized Linear Model to assess determinants of acceptance. ## Code/Software We performed statistical analysis using R 4.2.2 software (R Core Team, 2022). Our dependent variable is the “Acceptance of lion reintroduction’’ whereby we coded Yes as 1 and No as 0. We used the generalized linear model (GLM) with binomial family (link = logit) under the *nnet* package The explanatory variables for the response (Acceptance of lion reintroduction) in the initial model were province, village, age, sex, ethnic group (EG), religion, profession, personal control (PC), perceived benefits (PB), perceived risks (PR) and management system (MS). Equation model used: *GLM(Acceptance\~Province+Village+Sex+EG+Religion+Profession+Age+PC+PB+PR+MS,Data, family=binomial(link=logit))*. For model selection, we used the package *step* of *stats function* to exclude the variables without effects based on the AIC values by stepwise selection with backward direction   The null model was built with β0 as the mean of dependent variable (acceptance of lion reintroduction). We used function *aictab* of *AICcmodavg* package to generate the number of parameters (k), AICc, delta AICc, model likelihood and AICc weight of all models *Anova of stats function was* performed to determine the odds ratio (OR) for coefficients derived from the parsimonious model  Descriptive statistics were determined for additional parameters behind the responses provided by respondents. For all statistical analyses, the results were validated based on the threshold of significance for the value of p-value ≤ 0.05. We got authorization from the park manager and verbal consent from respondents that we anonymized before processing data. ## Sharing/Access information This is a section for linking to other ways to access the data, and for linking to sources the data is derived from, if any. Links to other publicly accessible locations of the data: * [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9w0vt4bnd] Data was derived from the following sources: