US Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Flagstaff, AZ, United States of America.
Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, The Recanati-Kaplan Centre, Tubney House, Tubney, Oxon, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2018 Jul 5;13(7):e0196213. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0196213. eCollection 2018.
Conservation of large carnivores, such as the African lion, requires preservation of extensive core habitat areas, linkages between them, and mitigation of human-wildlife conflict. However, there are few rigorous examples of efforts that prioritized conservation actions for all three of these critical components. We used an empirically optimized resistance surface to calculate resistant kernel and factorial least cost path predictions of population connectivity and conflict risk for lions across the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA) and surrounding landscape. We mapped and ranked the relative importance of (1) lion dispersal areas outside National Parks, (2) corridors between the key areas, and (3) areas of highest human-lion conflict risk. Spatial prioritization of conservation actions is critical given extensive land use redesignations that are reducing the extent and increasing the fragmentation of lion populations. While our example focuses on lions in southern Africa, it provides a general approach for rigorous, empirically based comprehensive conservation planning based on spatial prioritization.
大型食肉动物（如非洲狮）的保护需要保护广泛的核心栖息地区域、它们之间的联系以及减轻人与野生动物的冲突。然而，很少有严格的例子表明，这些努力优先考虑了这三个关键组成部分的保护行动。我们使用经验优化的阻力表面来计算人口连通性和狮子冲突风险的抗核和因子最小成本路径预测，这些狮子分布在卡万戈-赞比西河跨界自然保护区（KAZA）及其周围景观。我们绘制并对以下内容进行了排名：（1）国家公园外的狮子扩散区，（2）关键区域之间的走廊，以及（3）人类与狮子冲突风险最高的区域。鉴于广泛的土地用途重新指定正在减少狮子种群的范围并增加其碎片化，保护行动的空间优先排序至关重要。虽然我们的例子集中在南部非洲的狮子身上，但它为基于空间优先排序的严格的、基于经验的全面保护规划提供了一种通用方法。
