Dr Amy Dickman Co-Authors Paper on the Grave Decline of Cheetah Population

Pembroke’s Kaplan Senior Research Fellow, Dr Amy Dickman, has co-authored a paper titled, ‘The Global Decline of Cheetah Acinonyx Jubatus and What it Means for Conservation’. The paper makes an urgent call on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to change the categorisation of cheetahs on its Red List from ‘vulnerable’ to ‘endangered’.

The paper is a compilation of the most comprehensive data on cheetah distribution and status. It makes a remarkable estimation that only 7,100 cheetahs exist in the wild, confined to just 9% of their historical distributional range. The analysis draws attention to the staggering decline of cheetahs across a distributional range and highlights the fact that most exist outside protected areas.

Dr Dickman is the Director of the Ruaha Carnivore Project (RCP), which develops effective conservation strategies for large carnivores in Tanzania’s remote Ruaha landscape. RCP is part of the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU).

The paper argues that the persistence of cheetahs depends on their survival outside and inside protected areas, and states ‘this requires a holistic approach to conservation that engages rather than alienates local communities.’

The RCP is directly involved in protecting the cheetah population in the Ruaha landscape. One way they achieve this is through a community camera trapping programme that encourages co-existence with wildlife on communal land, in exchange for community benefits. They have also carried out the first assessment of cheetah populations in Ruaha and have constructed a predictive cheetah distribution map for this area.  

The ethos of RCP closely aligns with the paper’s argument that there needs to be a ‘paradigm shift in conservation toward a holistic approach that incentivises protection and promotes sustainable human–wildlife coexistence across large multiple-use landscapes.’

The report has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and has received coverage from the BBC.