• Our Approach
• South Africa
• Tanzania
• Zimbabwe

The African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) is the leading international conservation organization focused solely on Africa. AWF believes that protecting Africa’s wildlife and wild landscapes is the key to the future prosperity of Africa and its people – and for over forty-five years AWF has made it our work to help ensure that Africa’s wild resources endure.

The leopards’ status across Africa has not been recently evaluated, and the conservation needs of the leopard are little understood. The new consensus among the conservation community sees the leopard threatened by illegal hunting as well as increased legal hunting quotas, habitat loss, and persecution by farmers and pastoralists over livestock predation. Moreover, conservation scientists agree that leopards may be more vulnerable to extinction than previously thought.

Despite this expert opinion, there has long been an assumption that leopards can cope in human-dominated landscapes and adapt to pressures such as habitat fragmentation. On either side of the argument there is very little leopard research that can direct successful conservation efforts for leopards in the future. It is this lack of knowledge that has prompted AWF to conceive the Greater Kruger Leopard Research Project in South Africa, in and around the Kruger National Park. Armed with the proper knowledge, AWF and partners can better identify the threats to leopards and implement strategies to mitigate them, thus ensuring a safer future for one of Africa’s most charismatic cats.

South Africa has pockets of healthy leopard populations, for example in the Singita Game Reserves bordering and within the Kruger National Park. Just beyond these protected areas, however, lie areas that are less favorable for leopards because of human encroachment. No restricted fencing between these areas exists, allowing animals to move naturally throughout; consequently providing a large research field exhibiting a variety of land-uses. As a result of their strategic location, the Singita Game Reserves will be the base for the project’s operations. Areas adjacent to the protected reserves and Kruger National Park will be a research focal point because of the numerous incidents of human-leopard conflict recorded in these areas, and the potential to turn this conflict into a profitable tourism venture benefiting both leopard and human alike.

The Greater Kruger Leopard Research Project is designed to achieve the following objectives:

• To determine the population of leopards, their habitat use and ranging patterns, and prey species abundance in and across the Singita Game Reserves and specific regions of the Kruger National Park;
• To determine the key threats to leopards in these regions;
• To initiate leopard-human conflict mitigation measures, and increase local capacity to proactively manage conservation issues.