Touted as the largest and most comprehensive number of African lions in Uganda, the number of stern paintings in some regions and marked hopes for others.
It drove over 26,000km and recorded 7,516 camera trap nights from 232 locations a year from January 2022 to January 2023, according to reports by three chief participants in a survey conducted by more than 100 Ugandan and international collaborators.
The survey was conducted in six of Uganda’s most important protected areas for large carnivorous animals in terms of the size of the protected area and the historic presence of carnivorous animals: Kidepo Valley National Park (1430 square kilometers), Pianup Wildlife Reserve (2400 square kilometers), Murchison Falls National Park (4000 square kilometers), Elizabeth Conservation Area (consisting of the national park and its associated wildlife of 2400 square kilometers), and Lake Mbro National Park (376 square kilometers).
The lion is listed as critically at risk by Uganda’s national red list and is known to occur in the three largest national parks. Murchison Falls, Queen Elizabeth, Kidepo Valley. Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area (QECA); It consists of a national park and a game reserve for Kimbara and Kigeji, and is considered one of the lion’s hubs in Uganda.
However, a report published on March 25th in The Conversation, an online academic journal by Alexander Richard Braczkowski, Arjun M. Gopalaswamy and Duan Biggs, draws a stern picture of Qeca’s lion.
It is only 39 lions in Elizabeth National Queen, home to tree-climbing lions. They say this is a significant decline of over 40% since the last survey in 2018.
In the northeastern part of Kidepo Valley, the best estimate is that only 12 lions are 1,430 km², in contrast to previous estimates of 132 lions conducted nearly 15 years ago.
“We estimated that around 240 lions still remain in the sample area of about 3,200 km² at the majestic Murchison Falls National Park, where the Nile is located east to west,” the researchers said. This is the highest number in Uganda, at least 5-10 times the number of Elizabeth Parks in Kidepo and Queen.
Braczkowski and Gopalaswamy are researchers at the Planetary Health and Resilient Conservation Group Centre at Griffith University and the Office of Conservation Management in Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, respectively. Duan Biggs is a professor and chair of Southwest Environmental Sciences and Policy at Northern Arizona University in the United States, and is a member of the IUCN (World Conservation Union). Aggrey Rwetsiba, senior manager of research and surveillance at the Uganda Wildlife Department, contributed to the research that underlie the conversation article.
Researchers say that the highly high detection rates of QECA lions in the past may have made field workers happy with applying QECA’s less robust lion monitoring methods due to the culture of climbing trees. This and the use of these various enumeration methods, which are often underestimated and underestimated by wide intervals of confidence, make robust inferences about population trends difficult.
They point out that for nearly 15 years, there is little information available on the population status of Uganda’s large carnivorous animals, including Murchison Falls, the largest national park.
They say that these species represent an important part of Uganda’s tourism economy’s growth, while each lion generates at least USD 14,000 from ecotourism revenues in the Elizabeth Queen Conservation Area (QECA).
This country has a lion climbing a famous tree that is highly sought after for this unique behaviour. Together, the lion and the leopard generate tens of thousands of dollars each year from safari viewing and alliance activities.
“Leaving an eye on proverbs was less critical for the country,” they say, “when wildlife is not closely monitored, the population could disappear within a few years, as the Tigers did in India’s Sariska Tiger Reserve.”
However, researchers say many people working in conservation will block surveillance. They argue that the “bean counter” approach to conservation overlooks the funds and actions that save animals.
One article entitled “Half of the resources of the threatened species conservation plan were allocated to research and monitoring” was published in September 2020 by Rachel T. Buxton and others in the journal Nature Communication.
Funds to combat biodiversity losses are insufficient and conservation managers say there is a need to make a trade-off between further losses and costs to avoid monitoring to guide effective actions.
Using species management plans for 2,328 listed species from three countries, they showed that 50% of the proposed recovery plan budget for the species was allocated for research and monitoring. Ironically, however, species that, overall, have a higher percentage of budget allocated to research and monitoring, will have lower recovery outcomes.
“We provide recommendations to carefully examine the value of gathering new information in a recovery plan, ensuring that protection programs emphasize surveillance that directly informs actions or research and actions,” the author said.
Others simply say that on a large scale, especially naturally shy, with a large household range (in multiple countries), and it’s difficult for animals that occur in very few numbers.
“Even in a relatively small African country, Uganda ranks 32nd out of 54 countries. How do you cover enough ground to see how the carnivorous population farms?
The Uganda Lion research author says their research attempted to address the issue by attracting a wide range of local and international experts living and working in Uganda.
In collaboration with the Uganda Government’s research and surveillance team of the Uganda Wildlife Department, they aimed to identify and connect independent scientists, government rangers, university students, lodge owners, and conservation managers of the country’s leading Savannah Parks.
“We wanted to cover more grounds with people and organizations that traditionally do not cooperate, and in doing so many of these individuals were first exposed to the science and field skills needed to build a robust, long-term surveillance programme for threatened wildlife,” they said.
The result is the largest and most comprehensive count of African lions, leopards and spotted hyenas. Researchers say they found hyenas that they found doing much better than they expected.
“But the lions are becoming increasingly worried and declined, indicating that they need to focus their conservation efforts,” they said. Beyond that, they say their counts proved the value of cooperation when it came to generating data that would help save animals.
A unique approach
Inspired by Kenya’s first national science-based investigation of key reserves of lions and other carnivorous animals, the first important step of this study was to secure the cooperation of the Uganda Wildlife Department’s Research and Surveillance Bureau.
Together, they identified six protected areas and other important conservation stakeholders. These are Pian Up Wildlife Reserve, Kidepo Valley, Trosenriki, Lake Mbro, Queen Elizabeth and Murchison Falls. Leopards and hyenas occur in several other parks (such as Mount Ergon and Lwenzoli National Park), but resource constraints prevented researchers from investigating these sites.
“We weren’t predisposed to who could or could participate in carnivorous research. We just wanted people closest to these species in the room,” they say.
They made the candidates for the lodge owners, government rangers, independent scientists, Kampala university students, NGO staff and even trophy hunters.
Everything came together for several days and learned how to spot carnivorous animals in each landscape, build detection history, and analyze data. Researchers offered five technical workshops showing how participants search for African lions in the landscape, mapping precisely where they drove.
They also taught participants: how to identify lions with whisker spots in high-resolution photos – these are small spots where cat whiskers come from their cheeks, how to determine camera trap images on the side of the leopard and spotted hyena body, and after techniques for data collection and analysis, population density and nutrition estimation techniques.
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Over 100 Ugandan and international collaborators participated in the All Hand on Deck survey, driving over 26,000km and recorded 7,516 camera trap nights from 232 locations from January 2022 to January 2023.
The researcher said: “The scientific approach focused on how to achieve the best possible carnivore. In the process, we identified some of the biggest drawbacks of previous studies, which involved double counting individual animals and failed to incorporate detection probability.
The meaning of the results
In contrast to lions, leopards appear to continue to occur at high density in certain areas, with Lake Mbro and Murchison Falls showing strong populations. Pian Up and Queen Elizabeth’s Ishasha sector recorded the lowest density.
Spotted hyenas have proven to be much more resilient. They occur at a density ranging from 6.15 to 45.31 pcs/100km² across the site surveyed. In Queen Elizabeth, as the lion population decreases, its number may increase as the lion population decreases.
These findings highlight the urgent need for targeted conservation interventions, particularly for lions in struggling populations in Uganda.
Values exceeding numbers
Researchers say their approach shared the burden of data collection and gave people the opportunity and skills to engage in wildlife science.
“For many emerging conservationists in the country, this was their first chance to become the author of scientific papers (an increasingly important component of the application of graduate degrees),” they say.
“Even if many people who worked in Uganda disagree about how to save big carnivorous animals, they can at least agree on how many people are, as they have at least a hand in collecting data and scrutinizing it. As we embraced a completely science-based approach, we are aware that the research should also improve over time.”
