The unpredictability of human behavior toward wildlife, coupled with changes in human behavior over space and time, are integral challenges of today's wildlife managers to meet administrative mandates. These challenges are exacerbated by extensive urban development and human population growth along with recent successes in wildlife conservation, leading to increasing encounters, and conflicts, between humans and wildlife. Thus, wildlife management is increasingly concerned with managing the co-existence of people and wildlife in a diminishing wild. However, attempting to analyze human–wildlife encounters, or solve human–wildlife conflicts, continues to be problematic. No structured behavior theory exists on how to address these management challenges. This study is a first attempt to do so through assembling and analyzing existing social-psychological, human-environment, and human–wildlife behavior theories and models in regard to their relevance to human–wildlife encounters. We illustrate the need to move from individualistic social and ecological approaches to an integrated complexity-theory based approach. We argue that human–wildlife encounters can only be understood and modified toward resilient relationships when treated as a complex social-ecological system. Key factors identified across literature impacting formation of positive and negative perceptions and behavior decision-making during an encounter are: cognition and emotions formed through beliefs and experiences across scales, barriers and benefits to specific behavior choices, and social thresholds. Using this multi-disciplinary approach, models and theories are drawn upon to develop the Integrated Adaptive Behavior Model of human–wildlife encounters.
