Experts at the University of Oxford have come up with the "most robust" method that will make counting Asiatic lions in India more accurate. Using a case study of the Maasai Mara National Reserve, and other conservancies in Kenya, the new method was devised by Arjun Gopalaswamy and Nic Elliot of the Department of Zoology at Oxford.
Published in journal Conservation Biology, it adapts methodologies that have successfully been used by scientists to count other big cats, such as tigers and cheetahs. Gopalaswamy said, "Good estimates of big cat abundance can only be obtained when a rigorous field method is combined with a tailor-made statistical method. This study demonstrates the power of such a combined approach. Think of it this way, a survey might reveal there are 200 identified lions, but it will tell you nothing about how many were missed and where. Our method crucially corrects for this problem that existed in previous methods by estimating density at a very fine scale so that we can produce a map to show which areas have high or low density."
The survey circumvents previous problems by using a "spatially explicit" approach, involving five field teams systematically searching the Maasai Mara National Reserve and surrounding conservancies for lions. Their search effort during the 90 day survey was carefully logged. High resolution photographs of individual lions helped researchers log their unique whisker spots.
