Lydia Cornu

Snow leopard - Photo Wikimedia Commons / Ismail Shariff

Once again: context specificity matters! Even under the same climate change scenario in the same ecoregion, some landscapes will require conflict mitigation measures, while others will offer restoration opportunities.

Regionally diverging results under climate change:
- more overlaps between snow leopards and pastoralism in the future Tajikistan (below)
- less overlaps and increasing spatial separation of wildlife and pastoralists in Kyrgyzstan

We used species distribution models to analyze the current and future distributions of (a) snow leopards, (b) their prey, and (c) pastoralist - and how they overlap - for two large landscapes in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Spatial overlaps signal interactions and the potential for conflict.

Snow leopard - Photo Wikimedia Commons / Irbis1983

Climate change impacts on the potential for coexistence between snow leopards and people in Central Asia's mountains - new paper out, led by @arashghoddousi.bsky.social in @ambio-journal.bsky.social @biogeoberlin.bsky.social

New paper out :)

PhD position @w-u-r.bsky.social:

Exploring community relations among land management
strategies, #conservation & livelihood outcomes around
#Gorongosa National Park
#Mozambique

Deadline: Sept 30th

More info: tinyurl.com/gorongosaPhD

As part of ABC-Futures project: www.wur.nl/en/project/a...

PhD position - Resilience of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning across landscapes

We are looking for two PhD researchers to work on the resilience of #biodiversity and ecosystem functions across a landscape gradient in the #Netherlands!

4-years, fully funded, great place @w-u-r.bsky.social, apply by 12.5.24.

Feel free to get in touch with questions!

www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/p...

Disruption of an ant-plant mutualism shapes interactions between lions and their primary prey Ant invasion reduces lion predation on zebras by disrupting a mutualism that protects trees against elephants.

Disruption of an ant-plant mutualism shapes interactions between lions and their primary prey | Science

doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Huge, huge thanks to the Mara Predator Conservation Programme and Kenya Wildlife Trust, to Femke Broekhuis, Cyrus Kavwele, Niels Mogensen, Dominic Sakat and Elodie Briefer.

Of course, there is not a lot of data so the insights we can derive from this are limited But the
Mara Predator Conservation Programme have now run two additional surveys of 380+ households, so it will be incredibly exciting to see the data that comes out of that

The data suggests that conflict comes down to livestock husbandry more than anything else — 78% of predation incidents occurred when the livestock was unguarded These findings highlight the potential for coexistence and species recovery in this mixed-use landscape

Most respondents were willing to tolerate the presence of wild dogs, even though some of the households had lost livestock to the predators (n= 13 out of 60) Interestingly, gender seemed to influence attitudes

How do the people who are going to be living alongside wild dogs feel about them? What are the problems that they foresee? I joined this project in 2019, and analysed the data from the first survey, conducted in 60 households

A prime example of this are the Mara conservancies. In the 2010s, African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) were sighted more and more frequently, and so the Mara Predator Conservation Programme ran a pilot survey of local households.

More humans = encroachment into wildlife habitats, and increased livestock numbers = competition for resources.

An African wild dog with its mouth open, standing in an open plain with dry grass

📣 My first first author paper is out!

And it’s a paper of firsts — we analysed a pilot survey providing the first insights into attitudes towards the return of African wild dogs in the Maasai Mara — providing some hope in the sparing vs sharing debate

Link: doi.org/10.1080/1087...

📷Teeku Patel

Close up of a muskox head with a group of muskoxen in the background in a tundra landscape with a but of snow still on the mountains

Muskoxen in Zackenberg from our LifePlan project camera traps.