Uganda loses 40% of its lions

New findings from country’s biggest ever count

ANALYSIS | THE INDEPENDENT | What is being touted as the largest, most comprehensive count of African lions in Uganda has painted a grim picture in some areas and a marked hope for others.

That is according to a report by three of the lead participants in the survey carried out by more than 100 Ugandan and international collaborators, driving over 26,000km and recording 7,516 camera trap nights from 232 locations spanning a year from January 2022 to January 2023.

The surveys were done in six of Uganda’s most important protected areas for large carnivores in terms of protected area size, and historic presence of carnivores: the Kidepo Valley National Park (1430 sq km), Pian Upe Wildlife Reserve (2400 sq km), Murchison Falls National Park (4000 sq km), Toro Semliki Wildlife Reserve (542 sq km), the Queen Elizabeth Conservation area (comprising the National Park and its associated wildlife reserves 2400  sq km), and Lake Mburo National Park (376 sq km).

Lions are listed as critically endangered on the national red list of Uganda and are known to occur in three of its largest national parks; Murchison Falls, Queen Elizabeth and the Kidepo Valley. The Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area (QECA); comprising the National Park and the Kyambura and Kigezi Game Reserves, has been viewed as one of Uganda’s lion strongholds.

But the report that was published in the online academic journal, The Conversation, on March 25 by Alexander Richard Braczkowski, Arjun M. Gopalaswamy, and Duan Biggs paints a grim picture about lions in the QECA.

It says only 39 lions are in the Queen Elizabeth National Park, home to the tree-climbing lions. They say this is a marked decline of over 40% since their last survey in 2018.

In the country’s Northeast, in Kidepo Valley, the best estimate is just 12 individual lions across 1,430km², in stark contrast with the previous estimate of 132 lions implemented nearly 15 years ago.

“In the majestic Murchison Falls National Park, through which the River Nile runs east-west, we estimated that approximately 240 lions still remained across some 3,200km² of sampled area,” the researchers said. This is the highest number in Uganda and at least five to 10 times higher than in the Kidepo and Queen Elizabeth parks.

Braczkowski and Gopalaswamy are respectively researchers at the Centre for Planetary Health and Resilient Conservation Group, Griffith University, and the Department of Conservation Management, Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. Duan Biggs is Professor and Chair, Southwestern Environmental Science and Policy, Northern Arizona University in the U.S. He is also a member of the IUCN (World Conservation Union). Aggrey Rwetsiba, senior manager, research and monitoring at Uganda Wildlife Authority, contributed to the research on which The Conversation article was based.

According to the researchers, past unusually high detection rates of lions in the QECA, due to their culture of climbing trees, may have led field workers to be satisfied in applying less-robust lion monitoring methods in the QECA. This and the use of these different enumeration methods, which often have underestimated and the wide confidence intervals, makes robust inference about population trends difficult.

They point out that for nearly 15 years, almost no information has been available on the population status of Uganda’s large carnivores, including those in its largest national park, Murchison Falls.

They say that although these species represent a critical part of Uganda’s growing tourism economy, with each lion in the Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area (QECA) generating at least US$ 14,000 annually from ecotourism revenue, according to estimates made in 2006, the populations of this flagship species have not been monitored consistently over time.

The country is home to the famed tree-climbing lions, which are much sought after for this unique behaviour. Together, lions and leopards generate tens of thousands of dollars annually from safari viewing and allied activities.

“Keeping an eye on the proverbial prize could not be more critical for the country,” they say, “When wildlife isn’t monitored rigorously, populations can disappear within just a few years, as tigers did in India’s Sariska tiger reserve.”

But, the researchers say, many people working in conservation discourage monitoring. They argue that a “bean counter” approach to conservation overlooks the funds and actions that save animals.

One such article entitled: ‘Half of resources in threatened species conservation plans are allocated to research and monitoring’ was published by Rachel T. Buxton and others in the journal Nature Communication in September 2020.

It says funds to combat biodiversity loss are insufficient, requiring conservation managers to make trade-offs between costs for actions to avoid further loss and costs for research and monitoring to guide effective actions.

Using species’ management plans for 2,328 listed species from three countries, they showed that 50% of species’ proposed recovery plan budgets are allocated to research and monitoring. Ironically, however, overall, species with higher proportions of budgets allocated to research and monitoring have poorer recovery outcomes.

“We provide recommendations for careful examination of the value of collecting new information in recovery planning to ensure that conservation programmes emphasize action or research and monitoring that directly informs action,” the authors said.

Others simply say that it is a hard thing to do at scale and particularly for animals that are naturally shy, have big home ranges (sometimes over multiple countries), and occur in very low numbers.

“Even in a comparatively small African country – Uganda ranks 32nd in size out of 54 countries – how does one cover enough ground to see how populations of carnivores are faring? This has been the challenge of our work in Uganda for nearly a decade now, monitoring African lions, leopards and spotted hyenas.”

The Uganda lion survey authors say their studies sought to address the problem by drawing on a wide range of local and international experts who live and work in Uganda.

Working with the Ugandan government’s Uganda Wildlife Authority research and monitoring team, they set out to identify and bring together independent scientists, government rangers, university students, lodge owners and conservation managers in the country’s major savanna parks.

“We hoped to cover more ground with people and organisations that wouldn’t traditionally work together. Doing so exposed many of these individuals for the first time to the science and field skills needed to build robust, long term monitoring programmes for threatened wildlife,” they said.

The result is the largest, most comprehensive count of African lions, leopards and spotted hyenas. The researchers say they found spotted hyenas to be doing far better than they expected.

“But lions are in worrying decline, indicating where conservation efforts need to be focused,” they said. Beyond that, they say their count proved the value of collaborating when it comes to generating data that could help save animals.

Unique approach

Inspired by Kenya’s first nationwide, science-based survey of lions and other carnivores in key reserves, the first important step of this study was to secure the collaboration of the Uganda Wildlife Authority’s office of research and monitoring.

Together, they identified the critical conservation stakeholders in and around six protected areas. These are Pian Upe Wildlife Reserve, Kidepo Valley, Toro Semliki, Lake Mburo, Queen Elizabeth and Murchison Falls. Leopards and hyenas occur in some other parks (such as Mount Elgon and Rwenzori National Park) but resource constraints prevented the researchers from surveying these sites.

“We had no predisposed notions of who could or would participate in our carnivore surveys, only that we wanted people living closest to these species in the room,” they say.

They shortlisted lodge owners, government rangers, independent scientists, university students from Kampala, NGO staff and even trophy hunters.

All came together for a few days to learn about how to find carnivores in each landscape, build detection histories and analyse data. The researchers delivered five technical workshops showing participants how to search for African lions in the landscapes together with mapping exactly where they drove.

They also taught participants: how to identify lions by their whisker spots in high-definition photographs – these are the small spots where a cat’s whiskers originate on their cheeks, how to determine identity in camera trap images of leopard and spotted hyena body flanks, post data collection analysis techniques, and a technique to estimate population densities and abundance.

More than 100 Ugandan and international collaborators joined in the “all hands on deck” survey, driving over 26,000km and recording 7,516 camera trap nights from 232 locations spanning a year from January 2022 to January 2023.

The researchers say: “Our scientific approach focused on how to achieve the best possible counts of carnivores. In the process we identified some of the biggest shortcomings of previous surveys. These included double counting individual animals and failing to incorporate detection probability. Even worse was simply adding all individual sighted animals and not generating any local-level estimates.”

What the results mean

In contrast to lions, leopards appeared to continue to occur at high densities in select areas, with Lake Mburo and Murchison Falls exhibiting strong populations. Pian Upe and Queen Elizabeth’s Ishasha sector recorded the lowest densities.

Spotted hyenas have proven far more resilient. They occur at densities ranging from 6.15 to 45.31 individuals/100km² across surveyed sites. In Queen Elizabeth, their numbers could be rising as lion populations decline, likely due to reduced competition and ongoing poaching pressure targeting lions.

These findings underscore the urgent need for targeted conservation interventions, particularly for lions in Uganda’s struggling populations.

Value beyond numbers

The researchers say their approach shared the load of data collection, and gave people an opportunity and skills to engage in wildlife science.

“For many emerging conservationists in the country, this was their first chance to be authors on a scientific paper (an increasingly important component of postgraduate degree applications),” they say.

“Even if many of the people we worked with disagree on how to save large carnivores in Uganda, they could at least agree on how many there are as they had a hand in collecting the data and scrutinising it. Since we have embraced a fully science-based approach, we recognise that our surveys too should improve over time.”