Mitigating Human-Wild Boar Conflicts: A Review of Integrated Strategies and Future Directions

Wild boar populations have expanded globally due to factors such as habitat restoration, climate change, and adjustments in hunting policies. This expansion has led to agricultural losses, threats to public safety, disease transmission, and ecological damage, thereby exacerbating human-animal conflicts. Current strategies for mitigating conflicts between wild boars and humans face challenges, including insufficient assessment of long-term control effects and limitations in population dynamics monitoring technologies. This paper reviews mitigation strategies for global wild boar conflicts from ecological, economic, and social perspectives and provides a comprehensive evaluation for their effectiveness. Existing mitigation strategies include population control (hunting management and reproductive regulation), habitat management (landscape barriers and food resource regulation), physical protection (electric fences and multimodal deterrence devices), and community engagement mechanisms (ecological compensation and participatory management). The effectiveness of these strategies varies significantly across regions. Global case studies on human-wild boar conflicts demonstrate that multidimensional collaborative governance has achieved notable success in mitigating these conflicts. For example, dynamic management systems based on intelligent monitoring and community participation can effectively reduce the incidence of wild boar conflicts. Given the limitations of the current single-indicator evaluations, this paper proposes a comprehensive evaluation framework encompassing "strategy effectiveness, cost, and sustainability". The application of synergistic multi-strategy approaches produces significant synergistic effects, exhibiting nonlinear superposition characteristics. Therefore, future efforts should integrate intelligent early warning systems and policy reforms to develop an adaptive social-ecological coupling framework.