IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Packer, C. | |
| Lion Conservation in Tanzania | |
| 2007 Conference Proceeding | |
According to recent guesstimates of lion numbers across Africa, Tanzania contains 25-50% of the lions left on the continent. Our current work primarily focuses on the urgent anthropogenic factors that must be addressed to conserve lions into the next century: the rising levels of human-lion conflict over livestock depredation in pastoralist areas and man-eating in agricultural areas, largescale habitat destruction by Tanzania's largest tribe, the Wasukuma, the interactions between inbreeding and infectious diseases in small, isolated populations, the impact of unregulated trophy hunting of lions, and the impacts of greater variability in annual rainfall in the face of global climate change. I have also established Savannas Forever, an NGO which systematically identifies areas with high levels of human-lion conflict and collects baseline data in 240 rural villages to evaluate effectiveness of conflict-mitigation strategies. SF explicitly links conservation with poverty reduction and increases communication between local communities, conservationists, and rural development agencies. By embarking on a coherent large-scale lion conservation program in Tanzania, we hope to provide a model framework for similar efforts to sustain viable lion populations in Botswana and Namibia and restore at-risk populations in Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. |
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