Narrative-Movement Framework (NMF): A socio-ecological systems (SES) approach to human narratives, animal movement, and coexistence in shared landscapes

Katherine Victoria Hernandez , Daniel T. Blumstein

1. Managing human-wildlife coexistence is essential for biodiversity
conservation in places where humans and nonhumans compete for access
to ecosystems. Viewing human-wildlife conflict as part of a complex web
of positive and negative connections that exist between humans and
nature is essential.
2. The field of socio-ecological systems (SES) seeks to understand these
connections between human-specific systems (i.e., cultural, political,
economic) and related ecological systems. We contribute to this growing
literature with a coupled narrative-behavior SES framework, through
which we present human environmental narratives as part of a cultural
system that changes and is changed by altered animal movement
behavior in shared landscapes.
3. The Narrative-Movement Framework (NMF) is built on a “people with
nature” perspective of human-wildlife coexistence that can be used to
understand connectivity and coexistence models. The NMF distinguishes
itself from previous coupled ecological-cultural frameworks by placing the
cultural system of human storytelling as a landscape-shaping factor,
along with human-wildlife interactions and wildlife movement.
4. The NMF further encourages long-term thinking, and thinking with the
complexity of target SES, to refine human-wildlife coexistence and
conservation planning in ways that do not replace, but seek to
complement relatively short-term and simplified approaches.