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WildCRU News

Charlotte Searle

Research Students

I graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2013 with a degree in Natural Sciences, specialising in Zoology. After graduation I made a foray into the insurance industry, where I worked as a catastrophe modeller and subsequently as a researcher in the field of emerging risks.

In the summer of 2016 I stepped back into the scientific world, spending four months as a research assistant at Palenque National Park in southeast Mexico, where I studied the foraging strategies and navigation patterns of black howler monkeys (Alouatta pigra) as part of a project run by Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM).

I joined the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) in September 2016 with a scholarship from the University of Oxford NERC Doctoral Training Partnership in Environmental Research. My DPhil research explores the status and ecology of African leopard (Panthera pardus) at sites in East and southern Africa, with the aim of informing population monitoring and conservation management for the species. I submitted my thesis in January 2021.

Using a large-scale spoor dataset collected by the Trans-Kalahari Predator Programme (TKPP), I employed occupancy and N-mixture models to investigate the factors influencing habitat use and relative abundance of leopard across a mixed-use landscape spanning Botswana and Zimbabwe, in the southern KAZA TFCA. I employed the same dataset to model multi-scale, multi-species habitat associations across the southern KAZA TFCA using the random forest machine learning algorithm.

In 2018, I conducted a series of camera trap surveys in the Ruaha-Rungwa landscape in southern Tanzania, in collaboration with the Ruaha Carnivore Project (RCP) and supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, Chicago Zoological Society & CBOT, Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, and Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium. I used the data collected to estimate leopard population density across the survey sites via spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) modelling, and discuss the implications of my findings for leopard conservation management across mixed-use African landscapes. I used the same data to investigate temporal partitioning and spatiotemporal avoidance and attraction among members of an intact East African large carnivore guild, and explore how these effects vary across an anthropogenic pressure gradient.

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Wildlife Conservation Research Unit
Department of Zoology,
University of Oxford,
Recanati-Kaplan Centre, Tubney House,
Abingdon Road, Tubney, UK. OX13 5QL

Oxford Univeristy

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