Africa has the fastest growing human population of any continent. As these populations continue to bloom, the loss of habitat and prey to an ever-expanding agricultural frontier is reducing the wild areas available to all large carnivores in Africa. Lions are the largest and most gregarious of cats in Africa, a combination which makes their ecological needs particularly exacting. Lion populations require large areas with high densities of prey – a recipe for wilderness that is increasingly scarce. As wild habitat is converted to farms and rangelands, lions inevitably find themselves at odds with people requiring land for their own needs. The remaining range for lions is contracting inwards to the protected islands of reserves and parks.
Read Panthera's Lion Report Card: The State of the Lion.
Project Leonardo is working to create a Pan-African Lion Corridor to connect populations of lions, the first time a conservation plan has been envisioned for the species across their African range. Our strategy consists of the following key activities:
Mitigating lion-human conflict
This is undoubtedly the single most essential element in any long-term plan to conserve the lion, and it forms the central pillar of our strategy. There are two primary elements:
1. Improving the ability of people to reduce conflicts with lions.
Not surprisingly, people who do a good job of taking care of their livestock have far fewer problems with predators than their neighbors who do a poor job. In many cases, the solutions are very simple ones that improve livestock husbandry, for example, fortifying bomas (corrals) with chicken-wire or metal gates to reduce the ability of predators to enter them. Our interventions are based on the simple premise that reducing people’s problems with lions increases the likelihood that humans will tolerate their presence,
2. Bringing material and social benefits to the people who tolerate lions.
Even with these simple solutions, some members of all communities will always have problems with lions, and a bullet or poison is often cheaper or less work. In impoverished areas with little access to employment and education, lions and other carnivores are often the targets for young men in the community who traditionally acted as the warriors and problem solvers. To overcome these issues requires more ingenious approaches, such as that offered by the ‘Lion Guardians.’ Developed by our partner organization Living with Lions, the Lion Guardians are Maasai murran – the warrior cohort – now employed to monitor lions and assist their community in resolving conflicts with carnivores. They respond to complaints about predators and help people resolve them without having to resort to poison or spears. For more information, please visit www.lionguardians.wildlifedirect.org.
Lion research in human dominated areas
The lion is well studied and a great deal is known about the species’ ecology and behavior from numerous, excellent studies in national parks and reserves. In general, further ecological research on lions is a relatively low priority for Panthera, though we are interested in certain circumstances, such as lion behavior in human-dominated areas where it is important to understand the ecology of lions which live among people and their livestock. Additionally, we are interested in lion dispersal and spatial behavior in fragmented areas, as this forms a key element of implementing our Pan-African Lion Corridor.
Sustainable trophy hunting as a conservation tool
Thirteen countries in Africa permit trophy-hunting of lions, and it is a huge business. Foreign hunters pay fees that sometimes exceed $100,000 to shoot a male lion. In principle, well planned and regulated trophy hunting can help to conserve lions by generating revenue that gives value to lions, and to the unprotected landscapes that they occupy. However, there are now strong data showing that poorly regulated hunting can impact lion populations and contribute to a population decline, especially in areas where there is additional anthropogenic killing. If hunting of lions occurs, it must be compatible with conservation goals that protect and maintain viable populations of the species. At the same time, it is essential that some of the revenue and benefits from hunting are channeled into the communities that shoulder the financial burden of living with lions. We are evaluating the effects of hunting on lions, and helping to develop models and protocols that continue to allow hunting but which mitigate negative impacts to lion populations.
Obtaining new information about lion range
Although the lion is perhaps the most studied and best-known felid, there are surprising gaps in knowledge. Panthera is conducting surveys in key linkage landscapes that are important for maintaining the ability of lions to move between large protected populations. Priority areas for lion surveys include Nigeria, southern Mali, southern Democratic Republic of Congo, southern Sudan, and Ethiopia. We are also developing necessary and novel methods for surveying lions. Under protection, lions are visible and often easy to find, making the species a relatively easy one to count and monitor. However, many of the landscapes in which we are interested in have no protection, and lions there are persecuted and shy. We are driving the development of new methods and protocols to survey lion populations and monitor their trends, including the largest ever attempt to calibrate camera-trapping to a known lion population in the Serengeti with the Serengeti Lion Project (www.lionresearch.org). This is the first rigorous attempt to assess whether camera-trapping will be an effective method to estimate lion numbers.
