Ruaha Carnivore Conservation

Today, conservation scientists face the daunting challenge of maintaining biodiversity in an increasingly human-dominated landscape. Although protected areas can provide vital refugia, reserves large enough to conserve viable populations of large carnivores are few and far between, so maintaining wild cats and other large carnivores across much of their remaining range hinges upon their successful conservation across a mosaic of different land use types and degrees of human pressure. One important form of human pressure is conflict between people and predators, which is particularly complex as it involves ecological, anthropological and economic drivers.

This project, which is still in the initial stages, aims to better understand the ecology and distribution of large felids and other carnivores across a gradient of human influences, including fully protected areas, trophy hunting zones, photographic tourism zones and village land. The study site is the Ruaha Landscape of Tanzania, which is a globally important area for biodiversity, and is thought to be one of the last remaining strongholds for lion, African wild dog and cheetah populations. The ecological data collected during the study will also be combined with detailed socio-economic information from a recent study of over 300 local households on village land (conducted for a PhD, through UCL and the Institute of Zoology), to examine how patterns of felid density, diet and habitat selection relate to conflict hotspots. This research should further our understanding of carnivore movements, habitat selection and diets on different forms of human-dominated land. By combining the ecological data with our current knowledge of the socio-economic drivers of conflict, we can identify the conditions under which conflict is most severe for people, when it poses a significant threat to large carnivores, and these data can be used to help develop the most appropriate and effective mitigation approaches.

The overall objectives of this project are:

• To describe how the ecology of large carnivores, with a particular focus on lions, leopards and cheetahs, varies between areas subjected to different management strategies and human pressures.
• To integrate both ecological and socio-economic data to produce a deeper understanding of the drivers of conflict, and thereby inform mitigation strategies.

The results of this work should help inform conservation strategies for large carnivores across a mosaic of land uses, and help develop techniques to ease conflicts between people and predators where they share land.