Quantitative surveys of wild animal abundance or activity, and assessments of the integrity of the complex natural ecosystems they live in, are typically quite laborious and meaningful analysis of the data obtained may require considerable time and expertise. This study describes the development and evaluation of a practical procedure for semi-quantitative consensus-based synthesis of subjective impressions accumulated by a small team of investigators who visited 32 different locations distributed in or around a community-based Wildlife Management Area in southern Tanzania. The subjective natural ecosystem integrity index (SNEII) scores obtained represent a holistic indicator of all aspects of land use, wildlife and human activities, which correlated strongly with objective indicators of wild animal community or whole natural ecosystem integrity that were estimated directly from quantitative survey data by the same investigators at the same locations. Also, comparative regression analysis indicated that the SNEII was a far more sensitive to variations in observed human activities than any of the objective alternatives, correspondingly yielding far more detailed insights into ongoing conservation challenges. This simple procedure for summarizing the overall, multi-faceted subjective impressions of individuals traversing extensive conservation areas may well be applicable through participatory approaches to routine programmatic monitoring by community-based staff with minimal training, and may therefore be more practically useful to devolved conservation areas like WMAs than conventional objective statistical synthetic indices relying on laborious collection and expert analysis of quantitative survey data.

Understanding how wildlife interacts with human activities across non-protected areas are critical for conservation. This is especially true for ungulates that inhabit human-dominated landscapes outside the protected area system in Nepal, where wildlife often coexist with livestock. Here we investigated how elevation, agricultural land, distance from roads, and the relative abundance of livestock influenced wild ungulate (chital (Axis axis), nilgai, barking deer (Muntiacus muntjak), wild boar (Sus scrofa) and sambar (Rusa unicolor)) abundance and occurrence. We counted all individuals of wild ungulates and livestock along 35 transects conducted between November 2017 and March 2018 in Bara and Rautahat forests in the lowlands of Nepal. We assessed abundance and occurrence relation to covariates using Generalized Linear Models. We found that livestock outnumbered wild ungulates 6 to 1. Wild boar was the most abundant wild ungulate, followed by nilgai, chital, barking deer and sambar. We found that elevation and livestock abundance were the most important covariates affecting the overall abundance of wild ungulates and the distribution of each individual ungulate species. Our results suggest spatial segregation between wild ungulates, which occur mainly on highlands, and livestock that concentrate across lowland habitats. Our results provide critical information to improve conservation in community forest areas of Nepal, where wildlife interacts with people and their livestock. Finding better strategies to allow the coexistence of ungulates with people and their livestock is imperative if they are to persist into the future.