WCS 3-Sentence Science

The Leopards, Wolves, and Hyenas Living Among Us

April 28, 2019

Photo credit: Kalyan Varma

Each year, Wildlife Conservation Society scientists publish more than 300 peer-reviewed studies and papers. “WCS 3-Sentence Science” is a regular tip-sheet — in bite sized helpings — of some of this published work.

Here we present work by I. Majgaonkar and A. Srivathsa’s of WCS India on the sharing of landscapes between people and carnivore species:

1. Scientists have found that leopards, wolves and hyenas show great potential to share lands with people outside protected areas in India, where the current protected area (PA) network is not sufficient to ensure long-term persistence of wide-ranging carnivore populations.
2. The findings shed light on the ability of large carnivores to exist alongside people in ‘conservation-enabled’ landscapes of India, seldom seen elsewhere in the world.
3. The authors call for recognizing the potential of human-dominated landscapes as conservation habitats, speculating that current and future changes in land-use practices, such as agricultural intensification and spread of permanent irrigation, could bear consequences for the three carnivores.

Study and Journal: “Land-sharing potential of large carnivores in human-modified landscapes of western India” from Conservation Science and Practice
WCS Co-Author(s): I. Majgaonkar, WCS India ; A. Srivathsa, WCS India

For more information, contact: Stephen Sautner, 718–220–3682, ssautner@wcs.org.