WildCRU lion project in the news

May 4, 2017

The Telegraph recently sent one of their journalists, Jessamy Calkin, out to visit WildCRU’s Ruaha Carnivore Project in southern Tanzania, which is led by Dr Amy Dickman. Jessamy wrote a great article on the project in the Telegraph magazine, highlighting the importance of this kind of work for long-term lion conservation and rural development: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/29/british-woman-fighting-save-african-lions-extinction/

David Macdonald and Alexandra Zimmermann celebrate a new partnership between the UK’s number one zoo with the world’s number one university to address key challenges in the conservation of endangered species

April 25, 2017

Chester Zoo and the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) have joined forces with the shared aim of delivering high-impact conservation research to address the global decline of biodiversity. The new partnership is designed to investigate major challenges in conservation by combining some of the international projects that Chester Zoo coordinate with cutting-edge scientific ... Read full story

Leopards along borders: Leopards are notoriously difficult to study, and doubtless that is particularly true of the rare Persian leopard, the subspecies being studied by WildCRU’s Mohammad Farhadinia. David Macdonald reports on the publication of new radio-tracking data on these elusive felids which have lost 84% of their former range in the region

April 18, 2017

Working in partnership with Panthera, in 2014 we launched the first comprehensive telemetry study on Persian leopard in north-eastern Iran, near the Turkmenistan border. This is part of Mohammad’s remarkable doctoral studies (reported recently here). Between September 2014 and August 2016, the team captured six adult leopards (5 males and 1 female) and fitted them ... Read full story

David Macdonald reports that 4000 people have read WildCRU’s new paper on crowdsourcing since it was published last month

April 26, 2017

Inspired by Linus Carl Pauling, the 1954 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, who remarked “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away.” Dr Emre Can led a team of WildCRU and WAP researchers in an exploration of how crowdsourcing could help conservation. As a focus we ... Read full story

You take the high road and I’ll take the low road: David Macdonald reports on a WildCRU collaborative study that reveals that Scottish badgers favour warmer lowland sites, but avoid human infrastructure

April 20, 2017

The WildCRU’s ever-growing portfolio of work on climate change, led by Chris Newman, has shown that badger population dynamics and behaviour respond sensitively to trends and variability in weather, making badgers an excellent sentinel species for climate change research. Building on this platform, and using camera trap data incidental to our work on Scottish wildcats, we ... Read full story

One of the most controversial wildlife issues in the UK today is the role of badgers in the transmission of bovine tuberculosis (bTB). A cross-disciplinary Oxford research team (led by David Macdonald and Adrian Smith) have identified badger-specific features of the immune response that may underpin badger susceptibility to bTB. Some of the results of this study also identify avenues that may be useful to boost the response to vacating badgers.

April 18, 2017

Attempts to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in cattle cost the UK taxpayer c. £99 m/annum (2013–14), yet the problem continues to worsen. The benefits of culling badgers have been disputed and hope has turned to vaccinating them (Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) has been promising when injected at tenfold the dose used on people). Indeed, ... Read full story