Journal article
Socio-political and ecological fragility of threatened, free-ranging African lion populations
- Abstract:
- Lions are one of the world’s most iconic species but are threatened with extinction. Developing effective range-wide conservation plans are crucial but hampered by the relative lack of knowledge on specific threats facing each population and the socio-political context for conservation. Here, we present a range-wide examination of the relative fragility of lion populations, examining socio-political factors alongside ecological ones. We found Ethiopia’s Maze National Park had the most ecologically fragile geographic population while Kavango-Zambezi was the least. At a country level, lion populations had highest ecological fragility in Cameroon and Malawi. When we examined socio-political fragility, Somalia was the most fragile lion range country, followed by South Sudan. When socio-political and ecological fragility were combined, lion populations in Maze National Park and Bush-Bush (Somalia) and more broadly, Somalian and Malawian lion populations were the most fragile. These insights should help inform more nuanced and appropriately targeted lion conservation plans.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 417.8KB, Terms of use)
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 3.0MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s43247-023-00959-3
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Communications Earth and Environment More from this journal
- Volume:
- 4
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 302
- Publication date:
- 2023-08-29
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-08-11
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
2662-4435
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1518059
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1518059
- Deposit date:
-
2023-09-07
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Nicholson et al
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2023, corrected publication 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record