NAIROBI ― Poisoning, poaching and loss of habitat have significantly reduced populations of lion prides in Uganda, signaling the need for long-term commitments to conservation action, researchers write in a recent study.

In the first study of its kind conducted in nearly two decades, the researchers surveyed lions (Panthera leo), leopards (Panthera pardus) and spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) in six protected areas across Uganda. They found a nearly 50% decline in some of Uganda’s most iconic lion populations over the past decade, including the famous tree-climbing lions of Queen Elizabeth National Park.

That population, and one in Kidepo Valley National Park, have hit critical lows, according to the study. Queen Elizabeth National Park now has about 40 lions, while Kidepo has about 22. Murchison Falls National Park remains Uganda’s lion center, with about 240 of the big cats, according to the study. It also has one of the highest densities of leopards in Africa, at about 14 individuals per 100 square kilometers.

Study lead author Alex Braczkowski, a research fellow at Griffith University in Australia, said Uganda has emerged as a prominent tourism destination for lion viewing, with Queen Elizabeth National Park a key draw because of the tree-climbing cats.

“This is a sighting that one will never forget as long as they live. Eight lions wedged in a euphorbia tree is simply incredible! Apart from the conservation ramifications, lions are a key part of the tourism economy,” he said.

But increased conflict between lions and cattle farmers has led to the poisoning of some of the most prominent prides over the past decade, Braczkowski said. There’s also the problem of high levels of bushmeat snaring, intended for other animals but which also catch lions. “In Kidepo, our survey garnered evidence that lions were being poached and numerous lion carcasses were recovered with the [Uganda] Wildlife Authority during our survey in 2022,” he added.

In an earlier study, Braczkowski and colleagues said the high density of lions in Murchison Falls highlights the importance of the park’s rich and biodiverse wetland ecosystem, describing its resident big cats as a “critical lion population of conservation concern in Uganda.”

For their latest study, they worked with more than 100 local actors (lodge guides, trophy hunters, university students and government rangers) to help collect data in the form of sightings of lions, leopards and spotted hyenas in the six protected areas.

While they established that the number of lions had steeply declined, that of hyenas remained the highest of all three predators, with a population density of eight to 40 times that of lions. Murchison Falls, again, hosts the highest hyena density in Africa.

However, this trend, the researchers said, could lead to a trophic imbalance, where the food chain gets disrupted as one species predominates and another declines.

“Some of the high hyena numbers we see in our study could be due to the decline of lions, but it’s just one hypothesis,” Braczkowski told Mongabay. “Hyenas may be more resilient than lions to snaring, [and] due to clan sizes, they can also eat larger things, especially when it comes to buffalos.”

The researchers warn that this sounds the alarm for Uganda’s lions, and are calling for greater community engagement in conservation efforts.

Braczkowski and colleagues said there’s a need to “cover a lot of ground” in scientific monitoring, surveying lions and other carnivores by involving many people, especially those around conservation areas. They’re now training the same conservation actors who helped in their survey to better monitor lion populations.

“We want to get some of the people closest to the lions on the ground [to help] with the monitoring [of] their numbers and being the eyes on the ground. The problem is that many people we worked with during our surveys hadn’t had a chance to engage in science and monitoring. This is pretty critical if we want sustained wildlife monitoring at scale on an annual basis,” Braczkowski said.

Jonathan Growcott, a Ph.D. student in ecology at the University of Exeter, U.K., who works on the integration of technology, including AI, to enhance monitoring of large African carnivores in Tanzania, said successful conservation requires an understanding of the challenges faced by both wildlife and people across a landscape.

“The needs of both are vitally important. Understanding how we can reduce challenges so that both people and animals can benefit is imperative for conservation,” said Growcott, who wasn’t involved in the recent study.

With the increasing adoption of AI tools into carnivore monitoring projects, he said, researchers can now accelerate data processing, which is often one of the most time-consuming components of a project.

“We can use AI, for example, to automatically remove blank camera trap images from data sets, classify species, and in some cases identify individuals within a population,” Growcott said. “If, through AI, we can automate other processes such as identifying lions through their whisker spots, then we could reduce the time between collecting the data and producing results which can inform data-driven conservation management.”

Banner image: A pride of lions inside Queen Elizabeth National Park. Image by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.

Citations: 

Braczkowski, A. R., Elliot, N., Rwetsiba, A., Mudumba, T., Gopalaswamy, A. M., O’Bryan, C. J., … Gibson, L. (2024). Insights into large carnivore populations in Uganda: A participatory survey of lions, leopards, and hyenas using spatial capture-recapture. Global Ecology and Conservation, 56, e03312. doi:10.1016/j.gecco.2024.e03312

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