Conflating “co-occurrence” with “coexistence”

Carter et al. (1) argued that coexistence is practical at fine spatial scales based on temporal segregation between tigers and people in and around Chitwan National Park, Nepal. The authors presented their coexistence model as an alternative to the widely held principle that long-term tiger conservation requires extensive areas where human-use is excluded. We believe that this study makes a fundamental logic error by conflating “co-occurrence” with “coexistence.” Their data demonstrate spatial co-occurrence conditioned on temporal separation, an unsurprising finding. Coexistence, the relevant interspecific dynamic process, has not been demonstrated and requires long-term data they did not collect.