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The African lion, Panthera leo, has, like many of the world’s megafauna, become threatened with extinction over the past century. Loss of habitat and prey, persecution in retaliation of livestock depredation, by-catch by bushmeat poachers and unsustainable trophy hunting are all documented anthropogenic caused threats to lion conservation. Here we present data that indicate the emergence of a further threat to lion conservation: the targeted poaching of lions for body parts. We present lion abundance and mortality data from field surveys in southern Africa between 2011 and 2018 of a resident lion population. The targeted poaching of lions for body parts accounted for 35% of known human caused mortalities across the landscape and 61% of mortalities within Limpopo National Park with a clear increase in this pressure in 2014. Retaliatory killing for livestock conflict accounted for 51% of total mortalities, however in 48% of conflict cases body parts were also removed, suggesting that a demand for body parts may incentivize conflict related killing of lions. The use of poison was the most common means of killing lions and was recorded in 61% of mortalities. Teeth and claws were the body parts harvested most often from illegally killed animals in the study area, with an increase from 2014 onwards. This pressure threatens the viability of the species in our study area and the success of current conservation initiatives. We suggest that the results of this study be viewed as a warning to the global conservation community to be vigilant of the impact that illegal wildlife trade can have on the conservation of lions, just as a similar pressure has already had on other big cat populations.

Leopard (Panthera pardus) populations across Africa are increasingly exposed to high levels of anthropogenic disturbance, and information on habitat use responses of leopards in human-disturbed landscapes can help inform status assessments and guide conservation interventions. Unfortunately, however, few studies have investigated leopard ecology in human-disturbed landscapes, particularly in Africa. We employed camera-trapping and occupancy modelling to provide inferences on leopard habitat use in a National Park in Mozambique impacted by subsistence farming and bushmeat poaching. Replicated detection/non-detection occupancy surveys were used to estimate site use by leopards in a representative area of the park, and to investigate relative impacts of environmental, conspecific and anthropogenic factors on leopard occurrence. The proportion of sites used by leopards was estimated at 0.814 (SE = 0.093), which is approximately twice the occupancy previously reported for lion (44%) and cheetah (40%) in the same area. Leopard presence was not strongly predicted by any of the covariates, indicating there were no strong limiting factors. While leopards generally avoided human settlements and were positively predicted by prey, results suggest that there was sufficient prey and space for the species to use most available habitats. The greatest contributing factor to leopard habitat use was a positive correlation with bushmeat poachers and lions. It is possible that these other predators provide a more accurate indicator of prey availability than our single-species indicator based on camera trap data. This study provides important novel information on habitat use by leopards in a system disturbed by rural human subsistence activities in Africa.

Rigorous status estimates of populations of large carnivores are necessary to inform their management and help evaluate the effectiveness of conservation interventions. The African leopardPanthera pardusfaces rising anthropogenic pressures across most of its contracting sub-Saharan range, but the scarcity of reliable population estimates means that management decisions often have to rely on expert opinion rather than being based on sound evidence. This is particularly true for Mozambique, where little is known about the ecology or conservation status of leopard populations as a result of prolonged armed conflict. We used camera trapping and spatially explicit capture–recapture models to provide a leopard density estimate in Xonghile Game Reserve in southern Mozambique, which is part of the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier conservation initiative. The estimated population density was 2.60 ± SE 0.96 leopards/100 km2. Our study provides a baseline leopard density for the region and the first empirical density estimate for southern Mozambique. Our results also suggest that current methods used to set trophy hunting quotas for leopards, both in Mozambique and elsewhere in Africa, may be leading to unsustainable quotas, which highlights the importance of robust empirical data in guiding conservation policy.

Using surveys of experts associated with 186 sites across 24 countries, we assessed the effectiveness of African protected areas (PAs) at conserving lions and their prey, identified factors that influence conservation effectiveness, and identified patterns in the severity of various threats. Less than one third of sampled PAs conserve lions at ≥ 50% of their estimated carrying capacity (K), and less than half conserve lion prey species at ≥ 50% of K. Given adequate management, PAs could theoretically support up to 4 × the total extant population of wild African lions (~ 83,000), providing a measurable benchmark for future conservation efforts. The performance of PAs shows marked geographic variation, and in several countries there is a need for a significant elevation in conservation effort. Bushmeat poaching was identified as the most serious threat to both lions and to wildlife in general. The severity of threats to wildlife in PAs and the performance of prey populations were best predicted by geographic-socioeconomic variables related to the size of PAs, whether people were settled within PAs, human/livestock densities in neighbouring areas and national economic indicators. However, conservation outcomes for lions were best explained by management variables. PAs tended to be more effective for conserving lions and/or their prey where management budgets were higher, where photographic tourism was the primary land use, and, for prey, where fencing was present. Lions and prey fared less well relative to their estimated potential carrying capacities in poorer countries, where people were settled within PAs and where PAs were used for neither photographic tourism nor trophy hunting.

This is the publisher’s final pdf. The article is copyrighted by the Ecological Society of America and published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. It can be found at: http://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/10.1002/%28ISSN%291540-9309/

In our recent perspective article, we noted that most (approximately 60 percent) terrestrial large carnivore and large herbivore species are now threatened with extinction, and we offered a 13-point declaration designed to promote and guide actions to save these iconic mammalian megafauna (Ripple et al. 2016). Some may worry that a focus on saving megafauna might undermine efforts to conserve biodiversity more broadly. We believe that all dimensions of biodiversity are important and that efforts to conserve megafauna are not in themselves sufficient to halt the dispiriting trends of species and population losses in recent decades. From 1970 to 2012, a recent global analysis showed a 58 percent overall decline in vertebrate population abundance (WWF 2016). Bold and varied approaches are necessary to conserve what remains of Earth’s biodiversity, and our declaration in no way disputes the value of specific conservation initiatives targeting other taxa. Indeed, the evidence is clear that without massively scaling up conservation efforts for all species, we will fail to achieve internationally agreed-upon targets for biodiversity.

The University of Pretoria, Canada National Student Grants; Wilderness Wildlife Trust; Wipplinger Fund and DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology for financial support; Twin City Ecoturismo and IdeaWild for donations of camera-traps.

Made available in DSpace on 2018-11-26T17:10:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2016-10-01 Oregon State Univ, Global Troph Cascades Program, Dept Forest Ecosyst & Soc, Corvallis, OR 97331 USA Univ Sydney, Desert Ecol Res Grp, Sch Biol Sci, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia Deakin Univ, Ctr Integrat Ecol, Sch Life & Environm Sci, Geelong, Vic, Australia Univ Washington, Sch Environm & Forest Sci, Seattle, WA 98195 USA Swedish Univ Agr Sci, Dept Ecol, Riddarhyttan, Sweden Univ Oviedo, Res Unit Biodivers, Mieres, Spain Zool Soc London, Inst Zool, Regents Pk, London, England Univ Oxford, Wildlife Conservat Res Unit, Dept Zool, Oxford OX1 2JD, England Recanati Kaplan Ctr, Abingdon, Oxon, England Panthera, New York, NY USA Univ Pretoria, Dept Zool & Entomol, Mammal Res Inst, Gauteng, South Africa Univ KwaZulu Natal, Sch Life Sci, Durban, South Africa Wildlife Conservat Soc, New York, NY USA Univ Stirling, Sch Nat Sci, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland IUCN Eastern & Southern African Reg Off, IUCN Species Survival Commiss African Elephant Sp, Nairobi, Kenya Ohio State Univ, Sch Environm & Nat Resources, Columbus, OH 43210 USA Univ Nottingham Malaysia Campus, Sch Geog, Semenyih, Selangor, Malaysia Chinese Acad Sci, Ctr Integrat Conservat Xishuangbanna Trop Bot Gar, Menglun, Yunnan, Peoples R China Univ Victoria, Dept Geog, Victoria, BC V8W 2Y2, Canada Raincoast Conservat Fdn, Sidney, BC, Canada Stanford Univ, Dept Biol, Stanford, CA 94305 USA Univ Calif Santa Cruz, Dept Ecol & Evolutionary Biol, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA Nelson Mandela Univ, Ctr African Conservat Ecol, Port Elizabeth, South Africa Bangor Univ, Sch Biol Sci, Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales Bangor Univ, Sch Environm Nat Resources & Geog, Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales Univ Pretoria, Ctr Wildlife Management, ZA-0002 Pretoria, South Africa Univ Estadual Paulista, Dept Ecol, Rio Claro, Brazil Wildlife Conservat Soc, India Program, Bangalore, Karnataka, India Int Union Conservat Nat, Species Survival Commiss, Gland, Switzerland Univ New South Wales, Ctr Ecosyst Sci, Sydney, NSW, Australia Oregon State Univ, Dept Fisheries & Wildlife, Corvallis, OR 97331 USA World Wildlife Fund US, Hope, ME USA Princeton Univ, Dept Ecol & Evolutionary Biol, Princeton, NJ 08544 USA Univ Sussex, Sch Life Sci, Brighton, E Sussex, England Duke Univ, Nicholas Sch Environm & Earth Sci, Durham, NC 27706 USA Univ Wisconsin, Nelson Inst Environm Studies, Madison, WI 53706 USA Univ Calif Los Angeles, Dept Ecol & Evolutionary Biol, Los Angeles, CA USA Michigan Technol Univ, Sch Forest Resources & Environm Sci, Houghton, MI 49931 USA Univ Technol Sydney, Ctr Compassionate Conservat, Sch Life Sci, Sydney, NSW, Australia Univ Calif Santa Barbara, Dept Ecol & Evolutionary Biol, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA Beijing Normal Univ, Inst Ecol, Beijing 100875, Peoples R China Univ Estadual Paulista, Dept Ecol, Rio Claro, Brazil

Transboundary protected areas may be important for the conservation of large African carnivores because these species require large tracts of habitat to maintain viable population numbers and gene flow. Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus Schreber, 1775), is a species that may benefit from transboundary conservation agreements. It occurs at naturally low population densities, makes use of large home ranges, and disperses over long distances, thus requiring large tracts of suitable habitat to maintain viable population numbers. Here we present the first scientific evidence of a breeding population of cheetah in Parque Nacional do Limpopo (PNL), Mozambique. We obtained data from camera-traps deployed during occupancy surveys conducted from 9 September 2011 to 31 August 2012 over a 3400 km2 study area located within the central third of PNL. These results highlight the importance of the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTFP) to the overall conservation of cheetah in Africa, and the potential value of transboundary...

The collapsing populations of large herbivores will have extensive ecological and social consequences., Large wild herbivores are crucial to ecosystems and human societies. We highlight the 74 largest terrestrial herbivore species on Earth (body mass ≥100 kg), the threats they face, their important and often overlooked ecosystem effects, and the conservation efforts needed to save them and their predators from extinction. Large herbivores are generally facing dramatic population declines and range contractions, such that ~60% are threatened with extinction. Nearly all threatened species are in developing countries, where major threats include hunting, land-use change, and resource depression by livestock. Loss of large herbivores can have cascading effects on other species including large carnivores, scavengers, mesoherbivores, small mammals, and ecological processes involving vegetation, hydrology, nutrient cycling, and fire regimes. The rate of large herbivore decline suggests that ever-larger swaths of the world will soon lack many of the vital ecological services these animals provide, resulting in enormous ecological and social costs.

The African lion (Panthera Leo) has suffered drastic population and range declines over the last few decades and is listed by the IUCN as vulnerable to extinction. Conservation management requires reliable population estimates, however these data are lacking for many of the continent's remaining populations. It is possible to estimate lion abundance using a trophic scaling approach. However, such inferences assume that a predator population is subject only to bottom-up regulation, and are thus likely to produce biased estimates in systems experiencing top-down anthropogenic pressures. Here we provide baseline data on the status of lions in a developing National Park in Mozambique that is impacted by humans and livestock. We compare a direct density estimate with an estimate derived from trophic scaling. We then use replicated detection/non-detection surveys to estimate the proportion of area occupied by lions, and hierarchical ranking of covariates to provide inferences on the relative contribution of prey resources and anthropogenic factors influencing lion occurrence. The direct density estimate was less than 1/3 of the estimate derived from prey resources (0.99 lions/100 km² vs. 3.05 lions/100 km²). The proportion of area occupied by lions was Ψ = 0.439 (SE = 0.121), or approximately 44% of a 2,400 km2 sample of potential habitat. Although lions were strongly predicted by a greater probability of encountering prey resources, the greatest contributing factor to lion occurrence was a strong negative association with settlements. Finally, our empirical abundance estimate is approximately 1/3 of a published abundance estimate derived from opinion surveys. Altogether, our results describe a lion population held below resource-based carrying capacity by anthropogenic factors and highlight the limitations of trophic scaling and opinion surveys for estimating predator populations exposed to anthropogenic pressures. Our study provides the first empirical quantification of a population that future change can be measured against.

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As an apex predator, habitat selection by African lions, Panthera leo, is primarily determined by bottom-up processes; however, increasing anthropogenic pressures may alter these relationships. Using camera traps and track surveys in the Limpopo National Park, Mozambique, we collected detection/non-detection data of lions and their prey and combined these with occurrence data on bushmeat poaching activities and spatial data on agro-pastoralist land use and other landscape features. We used hierarchical modelling within an occupancy framework to determine the relative influences of ecological variables on resource use and non-use by lions at two spatial scales. Habitat use by lions was most strongly influenced by the occurrence of their preferred prey across both spatial scales. However, lions were strongly negatively predicted by bushmeat poaching at the finer spatial scale and generally negatively predicted by agro-pastoralist activities at the coarser scale. Restricting our analysis to the home-range scale would have greatly underestimated the impact of bushmeat poaching on the ecology of lions. The results of our study illustrate the trophic dependency of prey resources to lions and the importance of considering scale when investigating species habitat use. Importantly, our study also demonstrates the limiting influence of bushmeat poaching on the use of habitat by an apex predator.