JULY 22, 2019
Tourists on safari can provide
wildlife monitoring data comparable to traditional surveying methods, suggests
research appearing July 22 in the journal Current Biology. The researchers
analyzed 25,000 photographs from 26 tour groups to survey the population
densities of five top predators (lions, leopards, cheetahs, spotted hyenas, and
wild dogs) in northern Botswana, making it one of the first studies to use
tourist photographic data for this purpose.
The idea came to lead author
Kasim Rafiq after hours with his Land Rover grill-deep in an abandoned warthog
burrow. Rafiq, then a Ph.D. candidate at Liverpool John Moores University, had
been following the tracks of a one-eared leopard named Pavarotti that he'd been
searching for for months.
"Eventually I got out of the
hole and spoke with the safari guides who I met on the road nearby, and who
were laughing," says Rafiq, who is about to begin a Fulbright Fellowship
to expand the project further at UC Santa Cruz. "They told me that they'd
seen Pavarotti earlier that morning. At that point, I really began to
appreciate the volume of information that the guides and tourists were
collecting and how it was being lost."
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