DOI: 10.5061/dryad.pc866t1qt
title: Livestock farmers’ traits, perceptions and knowledge on vertebrate scavengers in Central Nepal

description: 1. There is a long-standing relationship between humans and vertebrate
 scavengers, as scavengers’ contributions take on regulating (e.g. nutrient
 recycling, disease control), material (e.g. competition, livestock
 depredation) and non-material (e.g. sky burials, ecotourism) roles in
 society. A social-ecological approach to studying biodiversity is
 increasingly needed, since the inclusion of local perceptions and
 knowledge has proven critical for effective conservation programs and
 ecosystem management. 2. We examine livestock farmers’ perceptions and
 knowledge related to vertebrate scavengers in the highly diverse
 Chitwan-Annapurna Landscape (Nepal), and assess the sociodemographic
 traits that influence their perceived value of scavengers’ ecosystem
 services provisioning (ESP), and function via scavenging services
 (SS).  3. Farmers’ perceptions of functional importance (SS)
 showed species-specific gradation, unlike ESP, where only avian scavengers
 were perceived as beneficial. Our results show that the perception of
 scavenging as a beneficial ecosystem service and its importance as a
 biological function are decoupled for facultative scavengers, and coupled
 for obligate scavengers. Relatedly, we identify that affluence-related
 traits drove positive perceptions of ESP, and local ecological
 knowledge-based traits were linked to increased knowledge of function via
 SS.  4. Thus, this increased awareness of functional importance
 based on close contact with nature does not guarantee positive valuations
 of scavengers’ contributions, whereas formal education did influence
 positive perceptions despite reduced awareness of function. Additionally,
 our findings suggest that existing environmental education measures are
 targeting the right groups, as these respondents coincide with lower
 favorability of scavengers’ ecosystem services, but may be unable to
 overcome existing human-wildlife conflict.  5. For the first time
 in South Asia, we survey relevant community stakeholder’s attitudes
 towards an entire scavenging guild and their associated benefits,
 detriments, and functional importance. Our study illustrates the varied
 perceptions that exist for different scavenger species, and closely
 examines a wide-ranging set of sociodemographic traits that show disparate
 influences on farmers’ knowledge of ecological function and perceived
 ecosystem service benefits. Crucially, these findings can guide
 conservation and management priorities by considering the differences in
 public perception and awareness of scavenging, as well as the
 interpretation of nature’s contribution to people. 
description: Between 2018 and 2019, we conducted 141 interviews with livestock
 farmers across the Chitwan-Annapurna Landscaoe of Central Nepal. In each
 of the three study areas, we selected 16-24 villages according to their
 accessibility, and based on communications with local governmental
 officials and community leaders. At each village, we approached 1-6
 individuals that identified as keeping livestock by a combination method
 of random and snowball sampling (Cortés-Avizanda et al. 2018,
 García-Alfonso et al. 2019). All data was collected by hand in the field,
 and then the corresponding author manually digitized all responses into
 corresponding entries within Microsoft Excel.  Our
 fieldwork, including survey design and methodology, was conducted with the
 approval of The City University of New York’s Human Research Protection
 Program (HRRP) under the category of Human Subject Research (IRB File
 #2019-0413). In addition, we also received approval for our survey
 methodology and fieldwork from Nepal’s Department of National Parks and
 Wildlife Conservation. We sought verbal informed consent before proceeding
 with the survey, rather than written consent, due to variability in
 literacy rates, and farmers’ comfort with reading written documents and
 ability to sign. In accordance with the guidelines of our institution’s
 HRRP and Institution Review Board, we first read a pre-approved oral
 consent script aloud to participants that explained the purpose of our
 study, our local collaborators, and the nature of questions. Participants
 were assured that their identities would remain anonymous, and no personal
 identifiers would be recorded from the information collected. 
description: Analyses were conducted using R software 3.3.1 (R Core Team 2016)
 with ‘glm’ from the stats package for “univariate” (with fixed factor)
 models, and ‘glmulti’ from the glmulti package (version 1.0.7.1) for
 multivariate model selection (Calcagno and de Mazancourt 2010).
 Missing values (e.g., farmer was not asked about species as it
 was not included in the survey for a given survey area, farmer did not
 respond to the specific question) are designated as "NA". All
 analyses omitted NAs, unless otherwise specified in the
 manuscript.