458 M. S. Farhadinia et al.
FIG. 2 Locations (from GPS fixes) of a collared Persian leopard that dispersed from Tandoureh National Park in north-east Iran to Turkmenistan (Farhadinia et al., 2018). The locations show that although the leopard moved freely across the international border, the security fence, which lies further north within Turkmenistan, was a barrier to the leopard’s movements.
Most borderland leopard populations in Asia occur along unfenced borders, and thus transboundary movements are still feasible. For leopards that move freely across international
borders in Asia, the same individuals may be counted in more than one country, inflating abundance estimates (Bischof et al., 2016; Vitkalova et al., 2018). This may be a problem in the Caucasus and along the Russia–China bor- der (Vitkalova et al., 2018; Askerov et al., 2019). This empha- sizes the need for the establishment of internationally man- aged monitoring programmes and for sharing monitoring information. Transboundary information exchange can improve the accuracy and precision of population estimates, which can lead to a better understanding of the status of leopard populations.
Implications for policy
Transboundary conservation areas are widely recommended as ameans to encouragemultilateral intergovernmental part- nerships. The concept of international Peace Parks is being promoted as a way of linking biodiversity conservation with national security (McNeely, 2003), and such a park has been established between Arevik National Park in Armenia and Dizmar Protected Area in Iran, where leopards occur. In ad- dition to the two existing transboundary leopard initiatives in the Caucasus and Russia–China borderlands (Vitkalova et al., 2018;Askerov et al., 2019),we identified three key trans- boundary landscapes: (1) Kopet Dag ecoregion along the Iran–Turkmenistan border for the Persian leopard, although some parts contain impassable fences (Fig. 2), (2)Northern Tenasserim Forest Complex along the Thailand–Myanmar border for the Indochinese leopard, one ofWWF’sfiveprior- ity global landscapes (WWF, 2019), and (3)Hawf–Dhofar Mountains along the Yemen–Oman border for the Arabian
leopard. Despite the civil strife in Yemen, the border gover- norate of Al Mahrah in Yemen adjoining Oman’s Dhofar Mountains remainsless affected. Conservation paradigms need to be realigned with po-
litical reality when examining geopolitical situations for conservation (Linnell et al., 2016). Some Asian countries are facing security challenges from neighbouring coun- tries, which could reduce opportunities for transboundary cooperation. Given that the majority of borderland leopard populations occur along unfenced international borders, conflicting countries can unilaterally enforce the conser- vation of their transboundary populations and shift their conservation investments towards the borderland. An ex- ample is leopard conservation in Armenia and Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan Republic which, despite a political dispute, has succeeded in maintaining protected areas for leopards and supporting population recovery on both sides of the shared border (Askerov et al., 2019). In addition, effects of border fences on leopard move-
ments and demography need to be better understood. If planned without compromising national security, joint population monitoring (Feng et al., 2017; Vitkalova et al., 2018) and satellite telemetry (Farhadinia et al., 2018) can help elucidate the locations of corridors and source–sink dynamics across international borders. Citizen sciencemoni- toring schemes supported by border security personnel could provide coarse-scale data to identify key corridors. There are two intergovernmental organizations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), of which most of the regional countries within the ranges of the Indochinese and Persian leopard, respectively, are mem- bers. The ASEANWildlife Enforcement Network and ECO’s Division on Social Welfare and Environment could pro- vide a framework for the establishment of transboundary
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
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