Social Network Analysis of Human Wildlife Encounters to Predict Conflict Hotspots in Peri-Urban Interfaces

Abstract

The growing human-wildlife interaction at the peri-urban interface is rapidly increasing due to urban
sprawl, habitat fragmentation, and altered patterns of wildlife dispersal, leading to frequent conflicts
that threaten human health and wildlife conservation. Common traditional methods of conflict
assessment are typically based on spatial incident mapping, which does not account for the social and
interactional processes that drive conflict formation. The present research offers a new social network
analysis (SNA)-powered method to simulate the human-wildlife interactions in the form of interaction
networks and forecast the conflict hotspots in the peri-urban environment. Nodes represent human
communities, wildlife species, land-use features, and encounter events that are interconnected such
that the frequency of interaction, the proximity, as well as the co-occurrence of the events are
maintained in the shape of the edges. Degree centrality, betweenness centrality, clustering coefficient,
and community modularity are used as network measures that characterize the actors with the highest
level of influence, the most critical interactive channels, and high-risk interface areas. To detect
seasonal and behavioral changes in movement and human activity patterns, a temporal network is
evolved. The suggested framework combines social network indicators with the spatial features to
produce proactive conflict hotspot maps, which are more sensitive in comparison with the traditional
density-based approaches. Experimental analysis shows that the hotspots derived by SNA better
correspond to recurrent conflict events, and therefore, it is possible to identify potential risk areas
early. The results emphasize the role of interaction structure, but not the role of instances in conflict
development. The study will add a data-driven, scalable methodology for proactive management of
human-wildlife conflicts to facilitate evidence-based planning, mitigation strategies, and coexistence
based conservation policies in fast-urbanizing peri-urban settings.