Christina Himmelsbach completed her MSc thesis within the MHEI research group at the Freie Universität Berlin and was able to publish it in Global Ecology and Conservation, congratulations!

Her thesis analyzes the spatial patterns and drivers of human–puma conflicts across Argentina, focusing on two main conflict types: livestock depredation and trophy hunting.

Using online news reports and scientific literature from 2017–2022, the study identified 90 conflict locations and examined how selected social-environmental variables shape their occurrence across different social-ecological land systems. A multinomial logit approach showed that both conflict types concentrate in low-diversity cold and temperate rangelands as well as urbanized large-scale agricultural plains, with trophy hunting particularly prevalent in the latter. Settlement density and small-livestock density were influential for both conflict types, while proximity to protected areas characterized livestock depredation and the presence of unpaved roads characterized trophy hunting.

The thesis is available via the FU Refubium repository and was subsequently published as a peer-reviewed research article in Global Ecology and Conservation (Himmelsbach et al. 2025).