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Understanding habitat use by remnant populations of imperiled species can inform conservation efforts. Arctic ground squirrels (AGS; Urocitellus parryii) occupy alpine and boreal forest habitats in southwestern Yukon, Canada, where populations have been monitored since the 1970s. While alpine populations have remained stable, those in the boreal forest collapsed in the late 1990s and have not recovered. Propelled by the region-wide decline of AGS at low-elevation sites, our purpose was to document site occupancy by remnant populations and to identify habitats that are a high priority for monitoring and have potential for conservation. Using walking transects, we surveyed 155 sites in eight study areas for presence of AGS. Model-averaged occupancy probability was 0.643 (SE = 0.066), and the associated detection probability was 0.835 (SE = 0.075). AGS occurrence was strongly related to increasing habitat openness and also positively influenced by anthropogenic habitat and neighborhood occupancy. The availability of open habitat patches and connectivity among colonies within the boreal forest are consequential for the persistence of low-elevation populations of AGS. These factors may be linked to predator avoidance. Shrubification in the boreal forest as a result of climate warming may reduce AGS ability to detect and avoid predators. Recognizing anthropogenic habitats in land-use planning, and managing potential conflicts with landowners, may be important for the persistence and recovery of AGS at the southern edge of their range.

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.

Following an animal and interpreting its behavior and individual characteristics using its spoor is an age-old technique used by traditional hunter-gatherer societies. Standardized scientific surveys of cheetah spoor have been used to determine the presence or absence of cheetahs for habitat modeling, to identify behavior, and to determine occupancy and density. New technologies, such as hand-held field computers and software to identify individual cheetahs are opening up new avenues of research using this traditional technique.

Quantitative spatial analysis can be a powerful tool for informing conservation management strategies for cheetahs ( Acinonyx jubatus ). Tools and approaches include methods to predict where cheetahs are most likely to occur, quantify habitat suitability and fragmentation, assess population viability, and identify landscape linkages. Best used, quantitative analysis can help conservationists and managers to be proactive and be able to better predict exact areas where resources should be allocated and what specific kind of management interventions are needed. In this chapter, we provide a review of landscape-scale, spatial conservation planning approaches, and highlight the need to focus analytical modeling tools toward a better understanding of how to address the underlying drivers of cheetah population growth or decline—that is, fitness-related variables.

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/

Establishing and maintaining protected areas (PAs) are key tools for biodiversity conservation. However, this approach is insufficient for many species, particularly those that are wide-ranging and sparse. The cheetah Acinonyx jubatus exemplifies such a species and faces extreme challenges to its survival. Here, we show that the global population is estimated at ∼7,100 individuals and confined to 9% of its historical distributional range. However, the majority of current range (77%) occurs outside of PAs, where the species faces multiple threats. Scenario modeling shows that, where growth rates are suppressed outside PAs, extinction rates increase rapidly as the proportion of population protected declines. Sensitivity analysis shows that growth rates within PAs have to be high if they are to compensate for declines outside. Susceptibility of cheetah to rapid decline is evidenced by recent rapid contraction in range, supporting an uplisting of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List threat assessment to endangered. Our results are applicable to other protection-reliant species, which may be subject to systematic underestimation of threat when there is insufficient information outside PAs. Ultimately, conserving many of these species necessitates a paradigm shift in conservation toward a holistic approach that incentivizes protection and promotes sustainable human-wildlife coexistence across large multiple-use landscapes.

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.

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 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.

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.