Status & ecology of leopard (Panthera pardus) in African conservation landscapes

Thesis

Although widely considered one of the world’s most resilient large carnivores, the leopard (Panthera pardus) is severely threatened by habitat fragmentation, prey base declines, and human-induced mortality. In Africa, a relative lack of conservation urgency has resulted in the species’ status being poorly understood across much of its remaining range, despite evidence of range contractions and population declines across the continent. In this thesis, I set out to answer some of the most pressing questions facing the long-term persistence of leopard populations in Africa’s evolving conservation landscape, using data from two mixed-use landscapes which are likely to represent major strongholds for the species within its remaining African range. In Chapter 3, I find leopard to be widespread across the southern KAZA TFCA, Africa’s largest transfrontier conservation area, and show that prey and protection are important predictors of habitat use. I also find that the species is most abundant in areas with high protection and prey availability, whereas trophy hunting appears to have a negative influence on leopard abundance. In Chapter 4, I step back to take a community-level perspective on KAZA wildlife distributions, and show that altered rainfall and rising livestock numbers are emerging trends that may impact leopard and their prey in this important conservation area. In Chapter 5, I find that leopard density across southern Tanzania’s Ruaha-Rungwa landscape is likely to be largely driven by availability of prey, which itself varies with habitat types and anthropogenic impacts. My results show that a hunting area with significant protection investment supports a leopard density comparable to similar habitat in a photographic tourism area, and provide evidence that community-managed WMAs can be highly valuable for wildlife but should be prioritised for monitoring. In Chapter 6, I find evidence that leopard in Ruaha-Rungwa employ fine-scale partitioning mechanisms to facilitate coexistence with both dominant competitors and humans, and that growing anthropogenic pressures may interfere with these adaptations. Taken together, this work provides evidence that leopard are resilient but not immune to human impacts, and that populations may continue to decline across sub-Saharan Africa without major intervention. I use my findings to highlight priorities for leopard conservation in Africa, including securing prey populations, preserving highly-protected areas as refugia within mixed-use landscapes, closely monitoring at-risk populations, and enacting adaptive hunting quotas.

Authors: Searle, C

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-mz9nmje88
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Habitat use; Activity patterns; Random forest; Relative abundance; Botswana; Conservation; Trophy hunting; N-mixture modelling; Occupancy modelling; Carnivore ecology; Zimbabwe; Tanzania; African leopard; Spatially explicit capture-recapture; Community conservation
• Subjects: Leopard; Zoology; Conservation; Protected areas; Wildlife conservation; Transfrontier conservation areas; Ecology