Serengeti Science-ing!

We’re thrilled to announce another scientific paper from the Snapshot Serengeti team! This is one that has been a long time in the coming. It’s the revised third chapter of my dissertation, so you’ve heard me blog about these ideas time and time again. What’s especially exciting is that after several years of publishing methodological research about how camera traps and citizen science works, we’re finally turning your classifications into real ecological research, answering the fundamental questions about how species coexist.

“In the absence of a landscape of fear” has just been published in the Journal of Ecology and Evolution: you can check it out here. It’s an open access journal, which means you don’t need an academic library account to see the paper.

The short of the long is that we used camera traps to study how lions, hyenas, and cheetahs divided up the landscape in very fine scales. Our research before Snapshot Serengeti had indicated that lions exclude wild dogs from large areas of the landscape, so they lose out on access to the resources in these large areas and their populations suffer. Surprisingly, we found that cheetahs weren’t excluded from large areas nor did their numbers suffer in the same way.

We had suspected that this was because cheetahs were able to avoid lions on a moment-to-moment basis, but it was only with the camera trap data from Snapshot Serengeti that we’ve finally been able to test that!

Using Snapshot Serengeti data, we found that cheetahs actually show up more often in areas with more lions. This is probably because cameras reflect really desirable real estate — nice shady trees that attract prey and are near water sources. Instead of always avoiding those habitat hotspots because they have lots of lions (and lions are dangerous), cheetahs appear to just avoid those areas in the 12 hours immediately after a lion appears. So this means they’re able to get access to all the resources – shade, water, and prey – but still minimize the risk of actually running into a lion and getting chased or killed.

You can read more about the research here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.2569/full

In other news, I wanted to let you all know that I’m transitioning into a new position through the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). AAAS administers a big fellowship every year that places scientists into government agencies. I’ll be joining the US Department of State in the Bureau of Oceans, Environment, and Science, to work on international environmental issues. It means I’ll be taking another step away from the academic research, but I hope to stay involved on Snapshot Serengeti in some way. The camera traps are still going strong – now maintained by Meredith and our new collaborators Tom and Michael, and there’s a whole bunch more exciting ecological research in the pipelines.