Mahmood Soofi: Quantifying the relationship between prey density, livestock and illegal killing of leopards

Shortlisted for the Southwood Prize 2022 Mahmood Soofi talks us through his research project which saw him and colleagues use ranger-collected data on illegal leopard killings in Iran and an N-mixture model to quantify relationships between livestock, prey density and illegal killing. Overexploitation and carnivores Overexploitation is one of the major threats to biodiversity in many parts of the world, which is driving many species … Continue reading Mahmood Soofi: Quantifying the relationship between prey density, livestock and illegal killing of leopards

Community-level responses of African carnivores to prescribed burning

Fires are common in many ecosystems world-wide, and are frequently used as a management tool. Using South African carnivores as their focal community, Laura C. Gigliotti and colleagues explore the relative changes in carnivore intensity of use in post-fire landscapes associated with hypothesized changes in prey availability and top-down suppression. Prescribed burning is a common form of habitat management and assessing wildlife responses to burning is … Continue reading Community-level responses of African carnivores to prescribed burning

Carnivores without borders: management of transboundary populations when objectives differ

Using the recent case study of wolverines in Scandinavia as an example, Associate Editor, Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi highlights why management initiatives for transboundary populations need to collaborate across borders – and what happens when they don’t. Globally, carnivore conservation has two very different objectives. First, to protect the population of the carnivore species from going extinct. Second, to mitigate the impact of the carnivore on the … Continue reading Carnivores without borders: management of transboundary populations when objectives differ

Trophic rewilding: restoring top-down food web processes to promote self-managing ecosystems

Continuing our series on rewilding, Jens-Christian Svenning from the Center for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World, Aarhus University, focuses in on trophic rewilding. Here he considers the foundations and open-ended nature of this approach, and explains why there is still plenty of room for more research in this area. There is rapidly increasing interest in rewilding as an alternative to more human-controlled approaches to … Continue reading Trophic rewilding: restoring top-down food web processes to promote self-managing ecosystems

Cover stories: Cheetah chase

Egil Dröge shares the high-energy story behind issue 55:6’s cover photo. See more of how the day unfolded in this gallery. I followed this female cheetah that day on her hunt. She would frequently use the small termite mounts to take the advantage of the elevation to scan the tall grass for prey. At some point, while she was walking through the tall grass, she … Continue reading Cover stories: Cheetah chase

Long-term decline in prey increases predator competition

Bringing together data from a 50-year period to better-understand predator-prey interactions. Associate Editor, Matt Hayward discusses the recently published article, Changes in African large carnivore diets over the past half‐century reveal the loss of large prey by Creel et al. Much of our understanding of ecology comes from systems that are assumed to represent the way life has interacted for millennia. Yet this assumption is … Continue reading Long-term decline in prey increases predator competition

Integrating socio-economic and ecological data leads to better management recommendations

Comparing the effects of habitat fragmentation with those of human persecution on the Chilean güiña, Associate Editor, Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi discusses the recent article, A spatially integrated framework for assessing socioecological drivers of carnivore decline by Gálvez et al. When trying to understand the distribution and abundanceof species, very often, ecological studies ignore the interactions these animals have with one of the most ubiquitous species on the planet, the human! … Continue reading Integrating socio-economic and ecological data leads to better management recommendations