January 31, 2025 at 1:53 pm

Researchers Are Fighting To Keep Leopards From Extinction Using Innovative New Technology Deep In The Tanzanian Wilderness

by Kyra Piperides

Source: Pexels/Pixabay

We all know about the plight of the elephant, and other beloved animals that are endangered worldwide.

But what you may not know is that leopards are endangered too, with this big spotted cat listed as ‘vulnerable’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This status means that it has a high risk of extinction in the wild.

And when it comes to leopards, habitat loss is one of the key factors threatening their lives here on Earth. As our lands become more population dense, naturally we spread our building projects and farm land further and further out. Unfortunately for the leopards, this means the destruction of their natural habitats, and the consequential loss of the creatures they prey on, too.

Add to this the significant numbers of leopards that are directly killed by humans per year – either by poaching or by farmers protecting their livestock – and leopard numbers are dwindling year on year.

Source: Pexels/Frans van Heerden

This sorry truth was explained in a paper recently published in the Zoological Society of London’s research journal, Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation. The team of researchers, based across the Universities of Exeter and Oxford in the UK, and the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute, Tanzania, were ultimately working on ways to improve this statistic:

“Whilst leopards harbor one of the largest geographic distributions of any big cat, this is still only at 20% of their historic range. Moreover, across Africa, there has been a continental decline in populations. Subsequently, according to the IUCN Red List of endangered species, leopards are classified as vulnerable to extinction.”

Given this upsetting fact about leopards’ long-term chances of survival, the research team sought to understand more about how to specialize and improve conservation for these beautiful solitary predators. Conservation of leopards is complicated due to the way that the carnivores like to live.

As the researchers explain in their paper, the monitoring of leopards is both expensive and invasive, with technology including camera traps unreliable and sometimes even dissuading leopards from visiting the locations. Because of the creatures solitary nature, they tend to stay away from any areas of human activity, making detecting, identifying, and monitoring the bests all the more complicated.

In attempting to discover a solution for the problem, the research team decided to monitor the noises that leopards made instead.

While this sounds like an appropriate solution, cameras were preferred since they were able to distinguish different leopards, with conservationists recognizing individuals through their markings. In just hearing their sounds, it was supposed, the presence of a leopard could be ascertained, but the identity of the leopard would remain a mystery.

Source: Pexels/Pixabay

That was until this paper challenged those initial assumptions. Based on their hypothesis that individual lions may have individual roars – just like how our own voices mark us out as individuals – the team set out to find out for sure:

“Similar to lions, tigers, and African elephants, leopards have a simple, low frequency, vocal signature. We hypothesize that tools could detect vocal individuality in other taxa such as cetaceans or anurans, that demonstrate (1) relatively simple vocal signatures and (2) inter-individual vocalization variation, which is sufficiently large and greater than the intra-individual vocalization variation. “

If their hypothesis was correct, through use of specialized audio technology, conservationists would be able to identify the spread and whereabouts of individual leopards through their signature roars.

At Nyerere National Park, Tanzania, the researchers made their first steps in improving the monitoring and conservation of leopards.

They installed a selection of equipment – both audio and visual – with which they could monitor leopards as they frequented the area. The 64 stations included camera traps and audio recording units, with four microphones to maximize the quality of audio captured. When a sensor noticed an animal passing by the stations would activate, with both images and audio secured.

Source: ZSL

The two different formats were important. Now not only would researchers be able to listen to and identify a leopard through its visual markings, if it roared while passing by they would be able to match the vocal patterns of that leopard onto their knowledge of it as an individual, too:

“Photographic events of leopards were first extracted, and images of both flanks were used to identify individuals by their rosette patterns. The timing of these events was then used to investigate whether a photographically identified leopard roared in the concurrent audio recording. Manual processing of the audio recordings was made by visually inspecting spectrograms and annotating the timing of leopard roaring bouts.”

Now that the team had visual identification of individual leopards, and recordings of their roars, they were able to put their hypothesis to the test.

And their findings were undeniable.

Not only did the technology capture the leopards’ roar with sufficient audio intricacy to allow the creatures to be distinguished from other species of big cat, their vocal patterns were easily distinguishable from one another, too:

“Here, we make two major advances. First, we demonstrate that an inexpensive passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) device can be used to acquire individual leopard vocalizations as an additional data source. Second, we demonstrate that using the fundamental frequency contour of the second part of an individual roar can be used to identify individual leopards with high accuracy.”

Despite their success, the researchers do offer some reservations about the potential roll out of their project. Namely, while the technology will be extremely reliable for conservation efforts, it could be used for more nefarious means too.

Source: Pexels/Pixabay

While conservation is important, perhaps even more important is catching and prosecuting poachers, to make sure that the technology that is intended to save these big cats isn’t used to hunt them down instead.

In a future without poaching, and in which their habitats and vital ecosystems are preserved, life could look a lot more positive for our wild cats.

But until then, thanks to the ingenuity of this research team, conservationists have a novel way of identifying, monitoring, and protecting them – especially now they know that while leopards don’t change their spots, they don’t change their voices either.

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