The course is made up of three modules that explore the complex relationships between wildlife populations and people on an increasingly human-dominated planet, in the “age of humans”, the Anthropocene. The course approaches these relationships from the perspective of ecology, veterinary science, and several social science disciplines aiming to give students a holistic understanding of these issues, both from the perspective of conducting research and practical wildlife management. This One Health approach will introduce students to the way in which the environment, human health, wildlife health, and livestock health are interconnected.

The concept of the Anthropocene reflects the pervasive impact of humans on all ecosystems and all trophic levels. The module “Human impacts on wildlife” explores these diverse ways in which human actions, directly and indirectly, affect wildlife populations. These include issues like climate change, direct exploitation, land-use changes, invasive species, toxins and pollutants, microplastics, anti-biotic resistance, and diseases transferred from livestock. The impacts operate via mechanisms as diverse as direct mortality, reproductive rates, behaviour, physiology, and population genetics through human-induced natural selection acting on contemporary and evolutionary time scales. The module will focus on the way different impacts interact with each other and how global change issues interact with more local drivers. The way that wildlife is often unintentionally impacted by policy decisions made for other sectorial interests will also be covered.

The module “Wildlife population health” will focus on the multiple dimensions of wildlife health at individual and population levels, and the impacts of multiple anthropogenic and environmental factors, including toxins, nutrition, climate, infection biology, and inherited and congenital defects, traumas, and injuries. This will be supported with a solid grounding in the practical aspects of studying and monitoring wildlife health, including approaches to sampling in the field and collaborating across disciplinary boundaries. Finally, attention will be paid to the challenges of communicating One Health issues to the public, wildlife managers, policy makers, and other stakeholders.

The module “Human Dimensions of Wildlife Management” introduces key social science concepts such as human ethics, values, attitudes, norms, behaviours, and worldviews as well as issues related to power dynamics between groups, institutions, and policies. Human-wildlife conflicts, conflicts between different groups of people over the way wildlife are managed, and approaches to manage or mitigate conflicts will be central themes. The course will give students a broad knowledge of the key theories and terminology within different social science disciplines so that they can understand how these can all make complementary contributions to understanding the complexity of managing wildlife in the modern world.