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Big cats in borderlands: challenges and implications for transboundary conservation of Asian leopards MOHAMMAD S. FARHA DINIA ,S US A N A ROSTRO-GARCÍA,LIMI N F ENG
J AN F. KAMLER,ANDREW S PA L T O N,ELENA S HE VTSOVA ,IGOR KHOR O ZYAN MOHAMMED AL-DUAIS ,J IAN P IN G GE and DAV I D W. MAC D O N A L D
Abstract Large carnivores have extensive spatial require- ments, with ranges that often span geopolitical borders. Consequently, management of transboundary populations is subject to several political jurisdictions, often with hetero- geneity in conservation challenges. In continental Asia there are four threatened leopard subspecies with transboundary populations spanning 23 countries: the Persian Panthera pardus saxicolor, Indochinese P. pardus delacouri, Arabian P. pardus nimr and Amur P. pardus orientalis leopards. We reviewed the status of these subspecies and examined the challenges to, and opportunities for, their conservation. The Amur and Indochinese leopards have the majority (58–100%) of their remaining range in borderlands, and the Persian and Arabian leopards have 23–26% of their re- maining ranges in borderlands. Overall, in 18 of 23 countries the majority of the remaining leopard range is in border- lands, and thus in most countries conservation of these subspecies is dependent on transboundary collaboration. However, we found only two transboundary initiatives for Asian leopards. Overall, we highlighted three key trans- boundary landscapes in regions that are of high importance
MOHAMMAD S. FARHADINIA (Corresponding author,
orcid.org/0000-0002-
5385-6254) Oxford Martin School and Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, 34 Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BD, UK E-mail
mohammad.farhadinia@zoo.ox.ac.uk
SUSANA ROSTRO-GARCÍA,JAN F. KAMLER* and DAVID W. MACDONALD Department of Zoology, Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
LIMIN FENG and JIANPING GE Northeast Tiger and Leopard Biodiversity National Observation and Research Station, Monitoring and Research Center for Amur Tiger and Amur Leopard, National Forestry and Grassland Administration, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Biodiversity Science and Engineering & College of Life Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
ANDREW SPALTON Office of the Minister, Diwan of Royal Court, Muscat, Oman
ELENA SHEVTSOVA Federal Government Budgetary Institution United Administration of the State Nature Biosphere Reserve Kedrovaya Pad and Land of the Leopard National Park, Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation, Vladivostok, Russia
IGOR KHOROZYAN Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
MOHAMMED AL-DUAIS Foundation Endangered Wildlife & Department of Biology, Ibb University, Ibb, Republic of Yemen *Also at: Panthera, New York, USA
Received 14 February 2019. Revision requested 17 April 2019. Accepted 4 June 2019. First published online 19 June 2020.
for the survival of these subspecies. Recent listing of the leopard in the Bonn Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals is important, but more international collaboration is needed to conserve these sub- species. We provide a spatial framework with which range countries and international agencies could establish trans- boundary cooperation for conserving threatened leopards in Asia.
Keywords Asia, Bonn Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, borderland, conserva- tion geopolitics, leopard, Panthera pardus, security fence, transboundary
Introduction
these wide-ranging animals can fall under several political jurisdictions, resulting in a diversity of conservation chal- lenges and efforts (Bischof et al., 2016; Linnell et al., 2016). Neighbouring states may have different levels of techni- cal expertise, knowledge, capacity and financial resources (Karlstetter & Mallon, 2014). Importantly, persistence of large carnivore populations in one country can depend, because of source–sink dynamics, on populations on the other side of an international border (Falcucci et al., 2013; Farhadinia et al., 2015; Feng et al., 2017). Conservation of large carnivores requires a holistic appreciation of the geopolitical context (Hodgetts et al., 2019) for maintaining source populations as a priority and, where possible, enhan- cing links to ensure persistence of metapopulations. Although geopolitical borderlands are typically rich in biodiversity, protecting these landscapes is often challen- ging. National conservation programmes usually stop at in- ternational borders, but the species they aim to conserve and the threats they strive to halt often do not (Macdonald et al., 2018). Borderlands are characterized by dynamic social, political, economic and sometimes even ecological transitions that, at extremes, may involve armed conflict and political instability (McNeely, 2003). Man-made bar- riers along geopolitical borders, intended to control
L
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2021, 55(3), 452–460 © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319000693
arge carnivores have extensive spatial requirements that may extend beyond geopolitical borders. Consequently,
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