Populations of large carnivores can persist in mountainous environments following extensive land use change and the conversion of suitable habitat for agriculture and human habitation in lower lying areas of their range. The significance of these populations is poorly understood, however, and little attention has focussed on why certain mountainous areas can hold high densities of large carnivores and what the conservation implications of such populations might be. Here we use the leopard (Panthera pardus) population in the western Soutpansberg Mountains, South Africa, as a model system and show that montane habitats can support high numbers of leopards. Spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) analysis recorded the highest density of leopards reported outside of state-protected areas in sub-Saharan Africa. This density represents a temporally high local abundance of leopards and we explore the explanations for this alongside some of the potential conservation implications.

Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. (Makhado) 0920, South Africa +62 82298870007. AbstractHuman-wildlife conflict between carnivores and livestock and game owners is an issue of high conservation concern and has led to the global decline of many large carnivore species. Research has shown that carnivores are often blamed for higher levels of predation of livestock and game than actually occurs and this often leads to retaliatory killing. The aim of this study was to obtain information via scat analysis on the range of prey species taken by leopards in the Soutpansberg Mountains, South Africa, and combine these data with selfreported accounts of livestock predation from local landowners to examine differences between real and perceived leopard predation. Results showed that despite landowners reporting frequent events of leopard predation of livestock and introduced farmed game across the Soutpansberg farming community, no evidence of these species were found in leopard diets. The most frequently eaten species by relative biomass were bushbuck, hyrax and vervet monkeys; in contrast, the farmers reported cattle and impala as often being taken by leopards. Despite sharing the landscape with domestic cattle and introduced game, leopards in the Soutpansberg do not frequently utilise these species as prey and instead focus their diets on wild species. Humancarnivore conflict can be reduced by overcoming the mismatch between actual and perceived levels of predation via landowner education, effective anti-predation measures, an improved government response to reports of livestock predation and potentially giving economic value to problem animals via trophy hunting. Keywords: