Habitat selection and outdoor recreation help explain human-mountain lion conflict

There is growing recognition that human presence has widespread effects on ecological systems,^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7} yet how individual animals respond to chronic recreation exposure and how these responses affect human-wildlife conflict remains poorly understood. Using 6 years of high-resolution GPS data from 36 free-ranging mountain lions in California's Santa Cruz Mountains combined with spatially and temporally explicit measures of recreational intensity derived from Strava activity data, we reveal that mountain lions proactively avoid outdoor recreation, and respond most strongly to long-term averages in hourly human trail use at fine spatial scales (30 m). Despite strong population-level avoidance of recreational activity, we find evidence of a functional response in which individuals exposed to higher levels of recreation show progressively increasing tolerance of humans-a strategy that likely maximizes functional habitat in an already fragmented landscape. By simulating space use according to observed levels of tolerance, we show that individual variation in tolerance of humans does not explain the locations of known conflict events in recreational landscapes. Instead, conflict is better predicted by recreational intensity and occurs in habitats generally avoided by mountain lions. These findings challenge the commonly held assumption that human-tolerant individuals are more likely to be responsible for conflict and suggest that individual differences in spatiotemporal space use do not scale up to affect conflict risk. By linking fine-scale movement behavior to widespread patterns of conflict, our results highlight the importance of socio-ecological mitigation strategies that reduce human-wildlife overlap rather than targeting human-tolerant animals whose behavior may in fact facilitate long-term coexistence.