Research undertaken in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province by an international team of wildlife ecologists has not only confirmed the value of privately owned nature reserves and game farms in conserving free-ranging carnivorous animals but also highlighted the fundamental role of formal (national and provincial) parks. The team further included traditional communal lands in their study.

The lead author of the research paper was PhD student Gonçalo Curveira-Santos of the Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (abbreviated to cE3c) at Lisbon University in Portugal. The other members of the team were the University of Venda Department of Zoology’s Professor Lourens Swanepoel, Chris Sutherland of the Department of Environmental Conservation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in the US and Margarida Santos-Reis, also from the cE3c at Lisbon University.

“Widespread conversion of agricultural and livestock areas for the commercial wildlife industry, ecotourism and hunting is a major component of conservation in South Africa,” says Curveira-Santos. “Management initiatives and conservation outcomes are typically focused on the large charismatic species like lions or cheetahs, but we know very little about how unmanaged, free-ranging carnivores respond to landscapes defined by varying management and conservation models.”

The research area was in northern KwaZulu- Natal and embraced the 108-year-old uMkhuze provincial game reserve, the Mun-ya-wana private game reserve, commercial game ranches and traditional communal areas, including villages. These were classified as four different protection ‘layers’ and formed a ‘protection gradient’ from the first to the fourth layer. The researchers were assisted by reserve rangers and staff.

No fewer than 294 trail cameras were used to create a ‘camera trap network’, with each camera deployed for an average of 75 days. Activated by motion, the cameras captured 7 224 images of 13 species of free-ranging carnivores, all the way from small mongooses through spotted hyaenas to leopards. The researchers analysed the data for multispecies site occupancy (these occupancy rates acted as proxies for the abundance of the species concerned).

“Our results support the notion that the private reserves or game ranches play a complementary role to formal protected areas, but that it’s also important to recognise they do not play the same role, and may not be a conservation panacea,” highlighted Curveira-Santos. “For governments, it’s attractive to move conservation to the private sector, but for us to assess the conservation benefits of doing so, we need some benchmarks, and protected areas under long-term formal protection are important references to a ‘natural state’.”

The study established that the number and identity of the species of carnivores were similar between the provincial park, the private reserve and the game ranches. However, the number and variety of these animals were “markedly lower” in the traditional communal lands.

This data showed that free-ranging carnivores can thrive on private lands. These results, stated the research team, supported “the added value of multitenure conservation estates augmenting and connecting South Africa’s protected areas”.

• The research paper was published in the Journal of Applied Ecology