Abstract
We compile over 270 wildlife counts of Kenya's wildlife populations conducted over the last 30 years to compare trends in national parks and reserves with adjacent ecosystems and country-wide trends. The study shows the importance of discriminating human-induced changes from natural population oscillations related to rainfall and ecological factors. National park and reserve populations have declined sharply over the last 30 years, at a rate similar to non-protected areas and country-wide trends. The protected area losses reflect in part their poor coverage of seasonal ungulate migrations. The losses vary among parks. The largest parks, Tsavo East, Tsavo West and Meru, account for a disproportionate share of the losses due to habitat change and the difficulty of protecting large remote parks. The losses in Kenya's parks add to growing evidence for wildlife declines inside as well as outside African parks. The losses point to the need to quantify the performance of conservation policies and promote integrated landscape practices that combine parks with private and community-based measures.
Highlights
The need for ecosystem-wide monitoring has become more pressing as the goals of conservation have expanded from saving endangered species and national parks to sustaining biological diversity, ecosystem function and ecological services [1,2,3]
Owen-Smith and Ogutu [16] underscore the importance of longterm systematic monitoring in Kruger National Park for teasing out the impact of conservation policies and management practises from rainfall, predation and other ecological factors
The count data were obtained from the Department of Remote Sensing and Resource Surveys (DRSRS) for Tsavo East and West and the Kitengela, from DRSRS and Ottichilo [35] for Maasai Mara, from the Kenya Wildlife Service for Nairobi National Park and Nakuru, from Kenya Wildlife Service and Ian Douglas-Table 4
Summary
The need for ecosystem-wide monitoring has become more pressing as the goals of conservation have expanded from saving endangered species and national parks to sustaining biological diversity, ecosystem function and ecological services [1,2,3]. Exceptions for large mammal ecosystems include longterm ungulate counts in Africa, conducted in national parks such as Kruger [9], Serengeti [10], Ngorongoro [11] Maasai Mara [12] Nairobi [13,14] and Nakuru [15]. These counts provide population trends for individual parks, but do not compare the success of parks per se with similar non-protected areas, or the protected area systems as a whole with country-wide wildlife trends. Owen-Smith and Ogutu [16] underscore the importance of longterm systematic monitoring in Kruger National Park for teasing out the impact of conservation policies and management practises from rainfall, predation and other ecological factors
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