Anthropogenic pressure limits the recovery of a postwar leopard population in central Mozambique

Abstract

The population size and conservation status of wildlife in post-conflict areas is often uncertain. In Mozambique, decades of armed conflict resulted in largescale wildlife population depletion with limited conservation and research opportunities. The African leopard (Panthera pardus) is a large carnivore with great ecological and economic significance, yet their population status is largely unknown within Mozambique. Using camera trapping in conjunction with robust spatially explicit capture-recapture modeling, we estimated leopard density in 2021 for Coutada 11, a wildlife management area in the postwar Zambezi Delta landscape of central Mozambique. Leopard density was relatively low (1.57 ± 0.37 SE [latent-mixture-model] and 1.84 ± 0.41 [sex-mixture-model] leopards/100 km2 ), occurring in the bottom fourth of 161 range wide leopard densities, and similar to those from semiarid and human dominated landscapes. Prey-based carrying capacity estimates suggested that leopard density should be at least twice as large. Despite a recent and substantial reduction in poaching activity, evidence of snared leopards indicates that sustained bushmeat poaching, combined with sustainable, but additional legal offtake is suppressing leopard population recovery. This study provides important baseline insight into leopard population density in Mozambique and joins mounting evidence indicating that anthropogenic pressures limit large carnivore populations which is of major national and global concern. We suggest long-term monitoring of this leopard population to determine trends over time and implement effective conservation interventions in response to population changes. This population clearly has the capacity to recover if hunting quotas are reduced to account for illegal offtake and, more importantly, if antipoaching efforts are redoubled to reduce unsustainable anthropogenic mortality of leopards.