Anjali Watson’s research while affiliated with Wildlife Research and Conservation Trust and other places

Livestock depredation by wild carnivores threatens carnivore populations and livestock-dependent human communities globally. Understanding local attitudes towards carnivores can inform strategies to improve coexistence. In Sri Lanka, the dairy industry is expanding, creating a need for proactive conflict mitigation. Livestock depredation by the Endangered Sri Lankan leopard Panthera pardus kotiya occurs, but little is known about these incidents or the attitudes of those whose livelihoods may be threatened by this. We surveyed people in two rural communities, Palatupana and Maskeliya, that differed in the scale of livestock ownership, livestock management practices and socio-ecological factors, to characterize attitudes towards leopards and understand their determinants. In Palatupana, an area with extensive cattle rearing, depredation incidents were frequent, and attitudes towards leopards were positively related to respondents' age, number of dependants, years spent rearing livestock and a greater overall support for wildlife conservation. Attitudes were negatively related to respondents' knowledge of leopard ecology and awareness of leopard-related tourism, from which cattle owners do not benefit. In Maskeliya, where cattle rearing is secondary to other agricultural work, depredation did not occur. Here, attitudes were positively related to a desire for increased government assistance with cattle rearing. The inability to develop land for cattle husbandry was a common barrier experienced in both communities. Considering local attitudes can inform strategies to improve human–carnivore coexistence. Approaches that could improve attitudes towards leopards include involvement of cattle owners in tourism programmes, exploring potential alternative land ownership schemes, and improving infrastructure and access to veterinary care.

Large carnivores are vital for effectively functioning ecosystems yet globally their populations are declining, with habitat loss, prey depletion and human persecution the leading causes. Sri Lanka's apex predator, the leopard, numbers < 1000 mature individuals and has lost > 1/3 of its historic range. Ongoing human-induced leopard mortality occurs in Sri Lanka, but its severity, patterns and modes are poorly understood, particularly in the context of the island's civil conflict. Here we use a dataset of recorded human-induced leopard mortality events, divided into two periods-wartime (2001-2009) and postwar (2010-2020)-to investigate their temporal and spatial trends in order to instruct informed, targeted mitigation strategies aimed at ensuring human-leopard coexistence. Overall we recorded 145 individual leopard deaths over 125 incidents with a significant increase in mortality events and a non-significant increase in individual leopard deaths. In the postwar period annual leopard mortality incidents remained stable, albeit at a higher average (8.5/year) than during the conflict (3.6/ year). Most recorded postwar leopard deaths (72%) were caused by wire snares, with the highest proportion of total recorded leopard deaths (55.8%) as well as snaring deaths (77%) from the Central Province. In the Northern province a short-term increase in human-induced leopard mortality was observed immediately postwar , possibly due to resettlement. Although data was imperfect, as it relied on detection and reporting of mortality events, it nevertheless highlights the growing impact of wire snares, particularly in Sri Lanka's Central Highlands, providing a tangible starting point for initiating human-leopard coexistence actions.

IUCN Red List status assessment for the Sri Lankan leopard (P.p.kotiya)

Apex predators are key to functioning ecosystems but globally their numbers are in steep decline due to habitat loss and fragmentation as well as human exploitation. Amongst top predators, leopards have only recently been recognized as undergoing extensive range loss across sub-species. The distribution and protected area status of the Sri Lankan leopard, an endangered sub-species and the island’s apex predator, is increasingly well understood, however absence of information from outside protected areas hampers the design and implementation of long-term management strategies. Central to these strategies is the need to better understand drivers of human-leopard interactions. This study addresses these issues by first investigating the population size and structure, as well as aspects of behaviour and habitat use of leopards in un-protected Central Highland mixed land-use tea plantation lands; and second, identifying ecological and anthropogenic factors that underlie human-induced leopard mortality in this region. We employed a network of remote cameras to spatially explicitly estimate leopard population density and structure, with spatial models and temporal analysis undertaken to determine fine scale habitat preference and activity patterns. Resource selection models were used to identify factors influencing the spatial distribution of human-killed leopards and scat analysis to determine the extent to which domestic prey features in leopard diet. Results show a population density of 6.6 mature individuals/100 km2 . Spatial analysis highlights sex-based differences in leopard space use with females restricted to higher altitude refuge areas. Temporal activity patterns suggest leopards adaptively employ temporal niche partitioning, likely to avoid diurnally active humans. Domestic prey comprises a small proportion (<15%) of leopard diet here and human-induced leopard deaths were associated with thick vegetation but occurred in close proximity to humans and roads. Most dead leopards were snared, a method of killing that transcends spatio-temporal partitioning and complicates human-leopard co�existence.

Biodiversity loss is accelerating globally and traditional conservation actions, whereby targeted research is conducted within a framework shaped by government policy and is reliant on governmental support and/or funding by large, often top-heavy conservation agencies, may be inadequate to address observed rapid declines. This may therefore necessitate a new paradigm for conservation efforts, especially for high biodiversity nations with simultaneous rapid development and dense layers of government bureaucracy. It is within this administrative landscape that private sector partnerships can play an important role either through direct funding, logistical support and/or ground level initiatives. In Sri Lanka, the endangered, endemic leopard is the top terrestrial predator and as a wide-ranging carnivore is distributed across all habitat types, making it an attractive umbrella species for wider biodiversity conservation. Added to this is its iconic status which engenders widespread interest by various non-state actors to partner in conservation-oriented initiatives. Tapping into this interest, it is possible to complement the traditional state-led conservation paradigm with a potentially more flexible and proactive, multi-stakeholder, partnership-driven conservation model. In the un-protected tea estate landscape of the Central Highlands of Sri Lanka, the Wilderness & Wildlife Conservation Trust is working with a variety of private sector actors to identify key wilderness and mixed landscape areas of importance to leopard conservation and thus broader biodiversity conservation via the umbrella concept. Initial research is being enabled by private sector companies with an ingrained environmental ethos, and identified areas are being targeted for protection directly by private sector landowners. This highlights the potential for non-traditional but potentially rapid and wide-ranging conservation interventions which can circumnavigate some of the more unwieldy governmental bottlenecks and provide a useful complement to more traditional methods.

Apex predators fulfil potentially vital ecological roles. Typically wide-ranging and charismatic, they can also be useful surrogates for biodiversity preservation, making their targeted conservation imperative. The Sri Lankan leopard (Panthera pardus kotiya), an endangered, endemic sub-species, is the island’s apex predator. Of potential keystone importance, this carnivore also fulfills “umbrella” and “flagship” criterion and is of high ecological and existence value. Apex predator conservation requires identifying factors underlying distribution, so we used multi-scale maximum entropy modelling with sampling bias correction to investigate a broad suite of relevant ecological, climatic and anthropogenic factors in order to identify potentially suitable leopard habitat. Presence locations were determined from 15 years of surveys, observations and verified reports. The best bias correction procedure and scale were uncertain, so we employed a novel method of using information from all models across analyses to determine top models and identify influential variables. Leopard presence was most strongly linked to the landscape proportion encompassed by Protected Areas strictly limiting human presence, with more porous Protected Areas less influential. All three forest composition and configuration metrics investigated (area weighted mean patch size, patch density and forest connectivity) were influential, with increased patch size and higher connectivity predicting better habitat suitability for leopards. Habitat suitability was also better where cropland extent and urban patch size were small. In summary, ground-level protection and natural forest extent and connectivity are of profound importance to Sri Lankan leopard distribution and are key factors in ensuring the ecological integrity of the island’s faunal assemblages.

Response curves observed in the Maxent analysis for each environmental predictor used to construct the non-melanistic (control) model. (PDF)

The geographic distribution and habitat association of most mammalian polymorphic phenotypes are still poorly known, hampering assessments of their adaptive significance. Even in the case of the black panther, an iconic melanistic variant of the leopard (Panthera pardus), no map exists describing its distribution. We constructed a large database of verified records sampled across the species’ range, and used it to map the geographic occurrence of melanism. We then estimated the potential distribution of melanistic and non-melanistic leopards using niche-modeling algorithms. The overall frequency of melanism was ca. 11%, with a significantly non-random spatial distribution. Distinct habitat types presented significantly different frequencies of melanism, which increased in Asian moist forests and approached zero across most open/dry biomes. Niche modeling indicated that the potential distributions of the two phenotypes were distinct, with significant differences in habitat suitability and rejection of niche equivalency between them. We conclude that melanism in leopards is strongly affected by natural selection, likely driven by efficacy of camouflage and/or thermoregulation in different habitats, along with an effect of moisture that goes beyond its influence on vegetation type. Our results support classical hypotheses of adaptive coloration in animals (e.g. Gloger’s rule), and open up new avenues for in-depth evolutionary analyses of melanism in mammals.

Base map for the CSR test. (PDF)