Abstract
Due to anthropogenic pressures, African lion (Panthera leo) populations in Kenya and Tanzania are increasingly limited to fragmented populations. Lions living on isolated habitat patches exist in a matrix of less-preferred habitat. A framework of habitat patches within a less-suitable matrix describes a metapopulation. Metapopulation analysis can provide insight into the dynamics of each population patch in reference to the system as a whole, and these analyses often guide conservation planning. We present the first metapopulation analysis of African lions. We use a spatially-realistic model to investigate how sex-biased dispersal abilities of lions affect patch occupancy and also examine whether human densities surrounding the remaining lion populations affect the metapopulation as a whole. Our results indicate that male lion dispersal ability strongly contributes to population connectivity while the lesser dispersal ability of females could be a limiting factor. When populations go extinct, recolonization will not occur if distances between patches exceed female dispersal ability or if females are not able to survive moving across the matrix. This has profound implications for the overall metapopulation; the female models showed an intrinsic extinction rate from five-fold to a hundred-fold higher than the male models. Patch isolation is a consideration for even the largest lion populations. As lion populations continue to decline and with local extinctions occurring, female dispersal ability and the proximity to the nearest lion population are serious considerations for the recolonization of individual populations and for broader conservation efforts.
Highlights
African lions (Panthera leo) once roamed the greater part of the African continent
An incidence function model (IFM) can be built with snapshot presence/absence data of a species at a particular site, the simplest form of data that can be collected during field studies
Incidence function models assume that suitable habitat occurs in discrete patches surrounded by unsuitable matrix, and that occupancy of each patch is determined by local colonization and extinction events [29,45]
Summary
African lions (Panthera leo) once roamed the greater part of the African continent. As habitat generalists, they occupied a wide range of biomes with the exception of tropical rainforests and the interior of the Sahara desert [1]. Across the majority of their present-day range, lion populations are primarily associated with protected areas and managed hunting areas throughout sub-Saharan Africa [3]. Lions are declining primarily due to indiscriminate killing by humans [6,7], depletion of their prey base [8,9], and overexploitation due to poor management of trophy hunting [5,10]. Habitat conversion outside of protected areas has led to increasingly fragmented lion populations that are currently under threat of further isolation [11]
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