The common hippopotamus Hippopotamus amphibius can significantly influence the dynamics of ecosystems and engender serious conflicts with people but, in Kenya, one of the species strongholds, it has been little studied or monitored. We surveyed the hippopotamus population in the Masai Mara National Reserve and the adjoining pastoral ranches in 2006 using foot counts along 155.3 km of the main rivers. We counted 4,170 hippopotamuses in 171 schools. Comparisons with earlier surveys suggest that this population increased by 169.6% between 1971 and 1980 within the reserve and, although it did not increase within the reserve during 1980–2006, it increased by 359.4% outside the reserve during this period against a background of deteriorating habitat conditions. The overall density in 2006 was 26.9 hippopotamuses km-1 of river, equivalent to a biomass of 26,677 kg km-1 of river. The ratio of calves to 100 adults was 9:100 inside the reserve, 10:100 outside the reserve and 6:100 along tributaries of the Mara River, implying that the population is either increasing or that its spatial distribution is being compressed because of range contraction. The apparent increase in the hippopotamus population contrasts with marked contemporaneous declines in the populations of most other large mammalian herbivore species in the Reserve. We discuss possible reasons underlying the increase in the hippopotamus population.

Categorized as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, the common hippopotamus Hippopotamus amphibius is under considerable pressure from habitat degradation and hunting. Although human–hippopotamus conflict is known to increase retaliatory killing and culling of hippopotamuses, the issue has been little examined. Using interviews I investigated various spatial, ecological and agricultural factors that influence the vulnerability of farms to crop raiding by hippopotamuses in three villages to the south-east of Ruaha National Park, Tanzania. There was a positive correlation between these crop-raiding events and a farm’s proximity to the river and to hippopotamus access points (places where hippopotamuses leave and enter the river). Results from this study provide insights for management and conservation of hippopotamuses, including a need to identify key habitat areas to mitigate future conflict.

Conservation of a threatened species is reliant upon good quality monitoring information to provide population estimates and trends to inform management practices. Surveying to establish such data can be costly and difficult, particularly for cryptic species in forest habitats. We therefore used remotely triggered cameras to survey for the presence of the pygmy hippopotamus Choeropsis liberiensis in Sapo National Park in Liberia. In 1,247 trap days we obtained seven camera-trap photographs, the first photographic records of the species in Liberia. Habitat destruction, principally from illegal gold mining, is the greatest threat to the persistence of the pygmy hippopotamus within the Park. A range-wide survey of the pygmy hippopotamus is required to establish a robust baseline from which future conservation efforts can be developed. Understanding how this species is able to cope with the effects of habitat fragmentation across its range, and controlling commercial hunting, will dictate how it is able to survive the ongoing pressures of land conversion in West Africa.

Asia’s rangelands and mountains are strongholds for several endemic ungulate species. Little is known about the ecology of these species because of the region’s remoteness and the lack of robust scientific studies. Hunting, habitat modification, increased livestock grazing, disease and development are the major threats to the species. There is an urgent need for better monitoring to identify the size, distribution and dynamics of the populations of these species, and the threats to them, for effective conservation. The feasibility of standard scientific monitoring is greatly influenced by the remoteness of the region, the pre-existing scientific ideology, lack of expertise in the latest monitoring methods and awareness of biases and errors, and low capacity and logistical and financial constraints. We review the existing methods used for monitoring ungulates, identify the practical and institutional challenges to effective monitoring in Central Asia and categorize the methods based on various criteria so that researchers can plan better monitoring studies suited to particular species. We illustrate these issues using examples from several contrasting ungulate species. We recommend that scientific surveys should be complemented by increases in participatory monitoring, involving local people. The future of ungulate monitoring in Central Asia lies in a better recognition of the existing errors and biases in monitoring programmes and methods, allocation of more monitoring effort in terms of manpower, finances and logistics, understanding of robust scientific methods and sampling theory, and changing the scientific culture, as well as a commitment to ensuring that we monitor the things that matter.

The mountain gazelle Gazella gazella in Saudi Arabia is categorized as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. On the mainland the species’ survival depends on a few remnant populations in the western Mountains and coastal plains and on two reintroduced populations. The largest natural population of G. gazella in Saudi Arabia is the Farasan gazelle subspecies G. g. farasani, which inhabits the Farasan Islands in the Red Sea. We review and collate the available literature on this subspecies, mainly unpublished reports presenting wildlife census data, and supplement this with the most recent, 2009, count. The number of free-ranging gazelles has remained approximately constant since the first counts in 1988, with an overall density of 0.64 km-2 and an estimated population of 1,039 on Farasan Kebir in 2009. The populations on two other islands, As Saqid and Zifaf, have not fared as well, possibly because of uncontrolled hunting pressure, competition with domestic stock or poor habitat conditions overall. The population on Qummah Island is extinct. Threats to this subspecies include uncontrolled hunting and uncoordinated development. Continued protection of this apparently stable population of mountain gazelle in Saudi Arabia is imperative to ensure the survival of the species.

Benchmarking, the comparison of efficiency measures of an organization against those of other organizations, is widely used in industry, medical practice and agriculture as a means of learning where practice can be improved. This could be used by conservationists for routine repeatable activities, such as the treatment of invasive species or the survival rate of transplanted plants. We give three examples of the benefits of cross-site comparisons: grazing management in South Africa, husbandry of captive penguins and management of lagoons for wading birds. Benchmarking, by comparing effectiveness with others, is the initial stage in identifying weaknesses and leads on to learning how to improve through cross-site comparisons, comparisons with better performers or examination of the published literature. We suggest that the term best practice, which is often used as part of benchmarking, is unsuitable as it implies a comparison of all options, which rarely takes place, and it is subject to change as knowledge and techniques develop. An alternative term is current effective practice.

Most research on attitudes to parks in sub-Saharan Africa has been in savannah regions and areas of low population density. Expulsion, exclusion and the imposition of external control are dominant themes, resulting in negative responses to parks, particularly those that represent hard-edged so-called fortress conservation. Our research in the densely populated area around a mid altitude forest park in western Uganda found an alternate narrative in which, despite its hard-edged fortress features, most people view Kibale National Park favourably. Based on a geographically random sample in two agricultural areas neighbouring the Park, our results indicate that most households felt they benefit from the Park and only a small proportion cited negative impacts. Rather than direct economic returns, the benefits most commonly noted by respondents can be characterized as ecosystem services. Most individual respondents and a large majority of the local political leaders said that the Park should continue to exist. Crop raiding by animals from the Park is a problem in some locations but resource restrictions and expulsion were not widely cited by our respondents. The fact that the large majority of residents migrated to the area after the Park was established may be an important explanatory factor for these responses, and this is also likely to be the case for many other mid altitude tropical forest parks, the demographic and land-use histories of which differ from those around many savannah parks.

Human conflicts may sometimes benefit wildlife by depopulating wilderness areas but there is evidence from Africa that the impacts tend to be negative. The forested states of West Africa have experienced much recent human conflict but there have been no assessments of impacts on the wildlife. We conducted surveys of mammals in the 710-km2 Gola Forest reserves to assess the impact of the 1991–2001 civil war in Sierra Leone. Gola is the most important remaining tract of lowland forest in the country and a key site for the conservation of the highly threatened forests of the Upper Guinea region. We found that Gola has survived well despite being in the heart of the area occupied by the rebels. We recorded 44 species of larger mammal, including 18 threatened, near-threatened and endemic species, accounting for all species recorded in pre-war surveys and adding several more (African buffalo Syncerus caffer nanus and water chevrotain Hyemoschus aquaticus). Populations of primates were healthy with little evidence of decline. Duiker detection rates were low and further work is required to confirm their numbers as they include five species endemic (or near endemic) to the Upper Guinea region, three of which are threatened. However, the population of African forest elephants Loxodonta cyclotis has collapsed, with only a few individuals remaining from c. 110 in the mid 1980s. We conclude that peacetime pressures from the bushmeat trade, clearance for agriculture, logging and mining are likely to be far greater for Gola than the pressures from the civil war.

An unusual combination of two major conservation threats, invasive species and bushmeat hunting, has had a positive outcome for wildlife conservation in the Brazilian Pantanal. The Pantanal is a wetland and one of the few non-protected areas in the Neotropics where people live but rarely hunt native wildlife. To understand why wildlife hunting is not a major conservation issue in the Pantanal an exploratory survey, semi-structured interviews, skull collection and tooth wear analysis of feral pig Sus scrofa, white-lipped peccary Tayassu pecari and collared peccary Pecari tajacu were conducted, and hunting registers distributed, in the central region of the Pantanal. The results showed that feral pigs are the main hunting target. Feral pigs are effectively acting as a replacement species for hunting of native wildlife because the pigs provide a constant, culturally acceptable, readily available and free source of meat and oil to remote ranches. We cannot evaluate, however, if the buffer from hunting that feral pigs provide to native wildlife outweigh this species’ potential negative ecological impacts.

The prevalence and impacts of the illegal trade in bushmeat are under appreciated in Southern Africa, despite indications that it constitutes a serious conservation threat in parts of the region. Bushmeat trade has emerged as a severe threat to wildlife conservation and the viability of wildlife-based land uses in Zimbabwe during a period of political instability and severe economic decline. We conducted a study around Savé Valley Conservancy in the South-East Lowveld of Zimbabwe to investigate the dynamics and underlying causes of the bushmeat trade, with the objective of developing solutions. We found that bushmeat hunting is conducted mainly by unemployed young men to generate cash income, used mostly to purchase food. Bushmeat is mainly sold to people with cash incomes in adjacent communal lands and population centres and is popular by virtue of its affordability and availability. Key drivers of the bushmeat trade in the South-East Lowveld include: poverty, unemployment and food shortages, settlement of wildlife areas by impoverished communities that provided open access to wildlife resources, failure to provide stakes for communities in wildlife-based land uses, absence of affordable protein sources other than illegally sourced bushmeat, inadequate investment in anti-poaching in areas remaining under wildlife management, and weak penal systems that do not provide sufficient deterrents to illegal bushmeat hunters. Each of these underlying causes needs to be addressed for the bushmeat trade to be tackled effectively. However, in the absence of political and economic stability, controlling illegal bushmeat hunting will remain extremely difficult and the future of wildlife-based land uses will remain bleak.

Under conditions of political instability and economic decline illegal bushmeat hunting has emerged as a serious conservation threat in Zimbabwe. Following settlement of game ranches by subsistence farming communities, wildlife populations have been eradicated over large areas. In several areas still being managed as game ranches illegal hunting is causing further declines of wildlife populations (including threatened species such as the wild dog Lycaon pictus and black rhinoceros Diceros bicornis), threatening the viability of wildlife-based land uses. From August 2001 to July 2009 in Savé Valley Conservancy 10,520 illegal hunting incidents were recorded, 84,396 wire snares removed, 4,148 hunters caught, 2,126 hunting dogs eliminated and at least 6,454 wild animals killed. Estimated future financial losses from illegal hunting in the Conservancy exceed USD 1.1 million year-1. Illegal hunters’ earnings account for 0.31–0.52% of the financial losses that they impose and the bushmeat trade is an inefficient use of wildlife resources. Illegal hunting peaks during the late dry season and is more frequent close to the boundary, near areas resettled during land reform and close to water. Illegal hunting with dogs peaks during moonlight periods. Our study highlights several management and land-use planning steps required to maximize the efficacy of anti-poaching and to reduce the likelihood of high impacts of illegal hunting. Anti-poaching efforts should be aligned with the regular temporal and spatial patterns of illegal hunting. Leases for hunting and tourism concessions should ensure minimum adequate investment by operators in anti-poaching. Reserve designers should minimize the surface area to volume ratio of parks. Fences should not be constructed using wire that can be made into snares. Land reform involving game ranches should integrate communities in wildlife-based land uses and ensure spatial separation between land for wildlife and human settlement. Means are required to create stake-holdings for communities in wildlife and disincentives for illegal hunting.

The wildcat Felis silvestris is a protected species in Turkey but the lack of information on its status is an obstacle to conservation initiatives. To assess the status of the species we interviewed local forestry and wildlife personnel and conducted field surveys in selected sites in northern, eastern and western Turkey during 2000–2007. In January–May 2006 we surveyed for the wildcat using 16 passive infrared-trigged camera traps in Yaylacı k Research Forest, a 50-km2 forest patch in Yenice Forest in northern Turkey. A total sampling effort of 1,200 camera trap days over 40 km2 yielded photo-captures of eight individual wildcats over five sampling occasions. Using the software MARK to estimate population size the closed capture–recapture model M0, which assumes a constant capture probability among all occasions and individuals, best fitted the capture history data. The wildcat population size in Yaylacı k Research Forest was estimated to be 11 (confidence interval 9–23). Yenice Forest is probably one of the most important areas for the long-term conservation of the wildcat as it is the largest intact forest habitat in Turkey with little human presence, and without human settlements, and with a high diversity of prey species. However, it has been a major logging area and is not protected. The future of Yenice Forest and its wildcat population could be secured by granting this region a protection status and enforcing environmental legislation.

A study to identify the felid biodiversity of the Sabangau Forest, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, was initiated in May 2008 and involved continuous sampling until October 2009. A total of 44 cameras in 27 locations were used and 5,777 functional trap nights (of 6,542 survey nights) resulted in confirmed sightings of the Sunda clouded leopard Neofelis nebulosa, leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis, marbled cat Pardofelis marmorata and flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps, representing four of the five wild felids of Borneo. The long-term use of fixed and roving cameras provided insight into the movements, occurrence and activity patterns of these elusive felids within a disturbed peat-swamp forest. In an area of 145 km2 (including buffer) the clouded leopard was the most commonly photographed felid (22 photo-captures of 53 total captures), followed by the leopard cat (21), flat-headed cat (7) and marbled cat (3). A total of 231 camera-trap nights were required to obtain the first photograph of a felid, the leopard cat, 704 for the clouded leopard, 3,498 for the flat-headed cat, and 5,423 (476 calendar days) for the marbled cat. A female clouded leopard was not photographed until 5,764 trap nights. This highlights the importance of long-term camera-trapping studies to maximize capture probability of these elusive felids and especially to account for potential differences in home range size and use by clouded leopard males and females.

Basic information required to conserve wild tigers Panthera tigris is lacking for the Bangladesh Sundarbans. The objectives of this study were therefore to estimate tiger home range size and obtain information on movement. Two adult female tigers were captured in the south-east of the Sundarbans and fitted with global positioning system collars. Mean home range sizes for the two tigers estimated with 95% minimum convex polygon and fixed kernel methods were 12.3 and 14.2 km2, respectively. A mean female home range size of 14.2 km2 would indicate a density for the south-east Sundarbans of seven adult females per 100 km2. The maximum distance moved by a tiger in 1 day was 11.3 km. Although preliminary these home range estimates indicate that the Sundarbans of Bangladesh has good quality tiger habitat relative to other tiger landscapes, highlighting the value of this mangrove ecosystem for the survival of this Endangered species.

We conducted an intensive survey of the Vulnerable eastern hoolock gibbon Hoolock leuconedys along the west bank of the Salween River in southern China, covering all known hoolock gibbon populations in China. We found 40–43 groups, with a mean group size of 3.9, and five solitary individuals. We estimated the total population to be < 200. In the nine groups for which we recorded composition, seven comprised one adult pair and 0–3 offspring and the other two groups both comprised one adult male and two adult females. The population is severely fragmented, in 17 locations, with the largest subpopulation containing only five family groups. Compared with the population in 1985 and 1994 five subpopulations have declined and gibbons have been extirpated from nine localities, although we discovered two previously unknown subpopulations. Commercial logging, illegal hunting, agricultural encroachment and population fragmentation pose serious threats to the future of H. leuconedys in China. An integrated conservation plan, including nature reserve establishment/expansion, enforcement of existing laws, conservation education, translocation and conservation-oriented research are needed to ensure the survival of H. leuconedys in China.