West African carnivores and elephants in the savannah

Summary

Large fauna across West Africa have suffered huge declines in the last 40 years. The W-Arli-Pendjari conservation complex (WAP complex), which spans the borders of Burkina Faso, Niger and Benin, encompasses five protected areas, hunting concessions and community lands and represents the last relatively intact savannah system in the region. 
With the largest population of the critically endangered West African lion, the last population of cheetah in the region and over 60% of the remaining West African elephant population, this site is of critical importance for the conservation of several Sahelo-Sudanese mammalian species.
Despite this, the complex faces threats from:

• Increasing incursions from pastoralist herders and their livestock
• Illegal logging
• Unsustainable levels of hunting for bushmeat
• Poaching for ivory and large carnivore body parts

These issues are exacerbated by a lack of capacity for law enforcement, monitoring and management.

Why we are there

This project is a collaboration between ZSL and Panthera and focuses on supporting the Beninese agency CENAGREF in protecting the parks that represent the core of the Benin side of the WAP complex: Pendjari (2,700 square kilometres) and W (5,633 square kilometres), as well as the neighbouring hunting zones.

The Pendjari National Park and its surrounding buffer zone is estimated to be home to almost 1,000 elephants and is a crucial site for lions and cheetahs. Although W has lower densities of wildlife, it still represents an important area for elephants and other threatened species.

What is ZSL doing?

This project is working to address the poaching threat to elephants, big cats and other wildlife, as well as increase the capacity of park management to protect the Pendjari and W National Parks. ZSL is conducting a number of activities to achieve this, including:

• Training park management teams and eco-guards in the use of SMART to improve surveillance, monitoring and protection coverage of the parks.
• Providing technical support to implement Panthera’s ‘PoacherCams’ at the two sites. PoacherCams allow for real-time transfer of images, such as photos of a person or group of people illegally entering a protected area. These images are transferred to an online web server and subsequently sent to the e-mail inboxes of a designated recipient, such as the local law enforcement agency, enabling rapid responses to suspected cases of illegal activity.
• Surveying the parks in partnership with the IUCN Cat Specialist Group to assess lion, leopard and cheetah populations using camera traps.
• Surveying markets for wildlife products to determine the level of illegal trade in big cat products and other traded wildlife.

ZSL is also improving law enforcement, through:

• Training and support to CENAGREF in basic law enforcement techniques.
• Guidance to CENAGREF in acquisition and management of criminal intelligence.
• Supporting and educating judiciary alongside partners, to strengthen the application of wildlife laws.
• Facilitating the collection of information on seizures and arrests from the Beninese customs and gendarmes and analysing the data to identify supply chains and estimate the scale of illegal wildlife trade.
• Empowering communities through the establishment of community surveillance networks around the parks to help gather information on illegal activity.

ZSL hosted a scientific event on the evening of Tuesday 9 May on Wildlife of the West African Savannah: unfamiliar and under threat.