Our rapidly changing world presents unfamiliar challenges, from a changing climate to human-driven habitat conversion. Carnivores, especially larger species, can be highly sensitive to such changes, and because of their position at the top of the food web, their globally declining populations can cause major shifts in the ecosystems they live in. Consequently, as land uses shift and human-wildlife conflict is aggravated, it is becoming increasingly pertinent to understand the factors driving carnivore distribution and abundance, across land-use types.
The Greater Etosha Landscape (Etosha National Park and surroundings) is home to a complex carnivore guild, including large carnivores such as cheetah, leopard and lion, as well as hyena and a variety of smaller carnivorous mammal species. This landscape consists of a matrix of land management systems (such as Etosha National Park, private freehold farms and communal lands), each exerting different pressures on resident human and wildlife populations.
That is why we have partnered with the Etosha Ecological Institute to develop a ground- breaking long-term research programme focused on carnivores - the Greater Etosha Carnivore Programme (GECP). Through this large-scale collaborative effort, involving numerous national and international partners, we are seeking improved insights into carnivore behaviour and habitat use in the Greater Etosha Landscape and what that means in the context of coexistence, landscape changes and habitat use in the Greater Etosha Landscape and what that means in the context of co-existence and landscape changes.
With this programme, our aim is to understand what factors are driving the distribution and abundance of carnivores in this complex landscape. We will focus on the role played by prey, diseases, intra-guild interactions, as well as humans in affecting these 13 carnivore species.
To date, our research efforts have prioritised the study of larger species due to their crucial role in ecosystems, their tourism value, and their potential involvement in conflicts with human populations. We have, for example, fitted lions and spotted hyenas with GPS collars to track their movements in and around Etosha. This will be use to study their ecology and sociality inside Etosha, but will also help determine factors driving human-wildlife conflict along the Park’s periphery. Additionally, we have launched citizen science initiatives to collect photographic data of leopards and cheetahs, allowing us to identify individuals and estimate population sizes. These findings are critical first steps towards effective carnivore monitoring, management, and conservation.
Since its inception, the GECP has amassed significant amounts of data - from tracking carnivore movements to genetic sampling. These efforts are rapidly improving our understanding of carnivore species' populations. In 2024, the GECP partners and other collaborators conducted an extensive playback survey to estimate the size of lion and spotted hyena populations across the Landscape. A student-driven citizen science survey has also been trying to generate the first estimates of cheetah and leopard populations inside Etosha National Park. Student-driven research has been at the heart of the Programme's efforts. It has already facilitated the development and training of eight students, with almost another dozen more currently working towards a postgraduate degree, under the GECP umbrella. Overall, the Programme and its associates have also translated their work on the ground to scientific output. So far, the GECP has eight peer-reviewed publications, two popular articles and seven conference presentations to its name - with many more to come. You can head over to our publications page to have a closer look at some of the research that has come out of this collaborative project.
