Connecting Carnivore Landscapes Through Coexistence and Collaboration

The Mara-Serengeti ecosystem and Amboseli-Tsavo-Mukomazi are two of Africa’s remaining large carnivore strongholds. Between these two ecosystems lies Kenya’s Southern Rift region in which viable lion, cheetah, and African wild dog populations continue to coexist with Maasai pastoralists outside of any formal protected areas. Our overarching goal is to support the efforts of these Maasai communities to coexist with lions, cheetah and wild dog thereby both safeguarding these populations and maintaining the landscape connectivity between Mara-Serengeti and Amboseli –Tsavo ecosystems. To do so requires increasing tolerance to large carnivores within the Southern Rift landscape as a whole, but with a focus on three critical corridors which form the primary links between the two periphery ecosystems. This project works with the eight Maasai communities that comprise two of these corridors (the North-Western and Western corridor between the Shompole and the Mara). To foster coexistence with lions, cheetah, and wild dog our project activities centre around building community capacity to (i) protect large carnivore habitat and prey populations, (ii) monitoring lion, cheetah, and wild dog movement, (iii) responding to and preventing human-carnivore conflict, (iv) develop of conservation and land use plans that will facilitate human-carnivore coexistence.