Comparable space use by lions between hunting concessions and national parks in West Africa

Abstract

1. Spatially varied resources and threats govern the persistence of African lions across dynamic protected areas. An important precursor to effective conservation for lions requires assessing trade-offs in space use due to heterogeneity in habitat, resources and human presence between national parks (NPs) and hunting areas, the dominant land-use classifications across their range.2. We conducted a large camera survey in West Africa, encompassing three NPs and 11 hunting concessions (HCs) in Burkina Faso and Niger. This equates to half of the 26,500-km 2 transboundary W-Arly-Pendjari protected area complex. We combined occupancy and structural equation modelling to disentangle the relative effects of environmental, ecological and anthropogenic variables influencing space use of Critically Endangered lions across 21,430 trap-nights from 2016 to 2018.3. National parks are intended to serve as refuges from human pressures, and thus we expect higher lion occupancy in NPs compared to neighbouring HCs. But because prey availability drove lion occupancy and was comparable between NPs and HCs, lions exhibited no spatial response to management type. Prey availability was primarily influenced by edge effects and natural water availability. Furthermore, water availability and habitat diversity were higher in HCs, possibly outweighing disturbances from higher human occupancy and road density and contributing to comparable lion space use between management types. Synthesis and applications.We found that lions exhibited no avoidance hunting concessions, despite higher human occupancy than in neighbouring national parks. This may be due to the lions' heavy reliance on depleted prey populations and preferred habitat characteristics in hunting concessions. We offer potential management interventions to indirectly influence lion space use, such as enhancing water availability and reducing human disturbance at park edges. Our findings provide insight into lion habitat preferences in a system degraded by human pressures and prey depletion, aiding in the understanding of the management's role in the ecology and conservation of apex predators and hunted species. S U PP O RTI N G I N FO R M ATI O N Additional supporting information may be found online in the Supporting Information section. How to cite this article: Mills KL, Harissou Y, Gnoumou IT, Abdel-Nasser YI, Doamba B, Harris NC. Comparable space use by lions between hunting concessions and national parks in West Africa. J Appl Ecol. 2020;57:975-984. https://doi.

Humans disrupt access to prey for large African carnivores

“…Duiker species were aggregated due to difficulty distinguishing the two in camera trap images, resulting in 11 total ungulate species in our analyses. Previous work in this system supports estimation of prey availability from camera trap data in that predator space use is heavily influenced by prey availability as estimated from camera trap detections ( Mills et al, 2020 ). Further, temporal activity overlap between species directly influences the strength of interspecific interactions ( Kronfeld-Schor et al, 2017 ).…”

“…WAP has an arid climate and consists predominantly of Sudanian and Sahel savannas, with savanna accounting for ca. 90% of the habitat cover in the study area ( Lamarque, 2004 ; Mills et al, 2020 ). We conducted our survey in the drier northern portion of WAP during the dry season with average monthly rainfall ranging from 0 to 1 mm in February to 42–91 mm in June ( Fick and Hijmans, 2017 ).…”

“…Our work is not human subjects research requiring IRB review, although we remain grateful to authorities granting permission for our research and their efforts to manage coupled human-natural ecosystems. (see Figure 2—figure supplement 1 , Mills et al, 2020 and Harris et al, 2019 for additional methods on camera deployment and image processing). Due to limited detections for some species, we aggregated survey data from all 3 years into a single dataset.…”

“…Due to limited detections for some species, we aggregated survey data from all 3 years into a single dataset. We accounted for temporal variation in human space use during the subsequent modeling process, and previous work suggests little annual variation in wildlife activity ( Mills et al, 2020 ). We created independence of species triggers using a 30-min quiet period between detection events using the ‘camtrapR’ package in R 3.5.1 ( http://www.r-project.org ) ( Niedballa et al, 2016 ), and we assumed detections to be a random sample of each species’ underlying activity distribution ( Linkie and Ridout, 2011 ).…”

Humans induce differential access to prey for large African carnivores

“…(see Fig. S1, Mills et al 51 and Harris et al for additional methods on camera deployment and image processing). We created independence of species triggers using a 30-minute quiet period between detection events using the 'camtrapR' package in R 3.5.1 (http://www.r-project.org) 52 , and we assumed detections to be a random sample of each species' underlying activity distribution 21 .…”