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.

Empowering the African People
Empowering Africans to be Africa’s stewards is at the core of AWF’s strategy. And, we begin right at AWF. Approximately 80 percent of our staff are African.

A Unique Continent, A Distinctive Conservation Approach
AWF believes that a continent as unique as Africa requires a unique approach to conservation. It is simply not enough to develop initiatives to protect single species or conserve individual pieces of land. We must look at the whole picture. How do people and wildlife live together and how do they clash? How will the well-being of local people be affected by conservation efforts? At AWF we approach all of our work at the “landscape level” – that is to say, we look at large landscapes. Within these landscapes, AWF implements a variety of efforts that conserve land, protect species and empowers people.

Our History in Brief
For thousands of years, the wildlife and people of Africa co-existed in balance. In the 20th century, wildlife faced escalating pressure from a growing human population and its effects, from habitat destruction to spread of disease, to overhunting. The balance was upset. In 1961, African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, Inc. was founded at the height of the African Independence movement to help newly independent African nations and people conserve their own wildlife. Since then, this organization, now called the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), has played a major role in ensuring the continued existence of some of Africa’s most rare and treasured species, including the elephant, the mountain gorilla, the rhinoceros and the lion. To do so, AWF has invested in Africa’s people. How? By training and educating conservation professionals and developing conservation enterprises to improve peoples’ livelihoods while also conserving wildlife. In 1998, AWF ushered in a new era in conservation with its African Heartlands Program. In essence, we have drawn lines in the sand around what we think (based on research, of course) are the most critical landscapes to preserve – large landscapes that are key to sustaining a diversity of species well into the future. These eight landscapes – or Heartlands – are at the heart of everything we do.

Nakedi Maputla, Species Research Officer
Joining AWF in 2007, Nakedi is the latest addition to AWF’s team of species researchers in Africa. Working in the Limpopo region, where he’s from, Nakedi’s studying the great cats to shape conservation strategies that will benefit communities he’s known all his life. Looking at Nakedi’s focus areas as a zoologist – Cytogenetics, Molecular Biology, and Geometric Morphometrics – it’s easy to see he is serious about conservation. Leopards as a species especially interested him because they are both powerful and elusive – making it a challenge to study and protect them.