Authors: Vogel, Susanne; Vasudev, Divya ;Ogutu, Joseph;Taek, Purity ;Berti , Emilio ;Goswami, Varun R. ;Kaelo, Michael ;Munk, Michael ;Li, Wang ;Svenning, Jens-Christian;

We have to look beyond mere tolerance or survival of megafauna and humans to assess if they can sustainably co-exist in an area. To be able to assess sustainable coexistence potential, we thus need integration of social and ecological perspectives, and inclusion of people’s willingness to coexist with megafauna. As an interdisciplinary, international network working in elephant and rhino conservation, we therefore apply Bayesian hierarchical occupancy modelling to detect people’s willingness to coexist with megafauna. We present our framework of sustainable human-wildlife coexistence potential, and the results of several applications of our willingness to coexist measure. We highlight the potential of combining this willingness to coexist measure with Species Distribution Models, using 556 interviews with Masaai people across the Maasai Mara, Kenya, collected January-March 2020, remote sensing data and aerial surveys. We also show its possibility to track changes in willingness to coexist with a second dataset of 280 interviews collected April-May 2021. Our framework, and measurement of willingness to coexist are useful in the field of Human Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence, as the measurement appears realistic enough to represent people’s support for living with megafauna, and reliable as quantitative component to be included in existing habitat suitability assessments.