Alex Braczkowski

And the only way that we know this is by monitoring very intensively and fiercely how lions, tigers, elephants are actually doing.

Well, this is the thing is, unfortunately, about 50% of studies that have been done in the past historically would have made that mistake.

And the way that you avert that mistake is actually by taking high-resolution imagery of their faces.

And you can actually look at their whisker spot patterns and the color of their noses.

And what that's different for every individual lion?

It's different for about 93% to 97% of all lions.

So Craig Packer really did the definitive study on this in 2017.

in the Serengeti, and he looked, and there was another group, Penichuk and Rudai, they also looked at the subsample of lions, and about 97% of all 900 samples that they looked at have different whisker spot patterns.

Exactly.

So that's one component, the individual identity of the animals, but also actually keeping a GPS log of where you're driving.

So the biggest thing that we are not doing in most animal counts, whether they be counts of dingoes, whether they be counts of elephants, is we don't factor in where we have looked and where we haven't looked.

And the...

aspect of where we haven't looked is just as important as where we have looked, because then we can actually factor in the animals which we aren't seeing in the population.

Yeah, so that's really an interesting aspect of our work in Uganda and some of the works of our colleagues in Kenya is that

The method has brought together over sort of 20 different entities in Uganda, over 100 different Ugandan and international collaborators have essentially merged forces to survey over 12,000 square kilometers of protected area land.

And it's not...

It's really the demands of the species.

It's the fact that these lions move over such big distances.

There's no scientific entity or research group or national park authority that could really do this effectively by themselves.

We need to work together to cover as much land and to share as much resources because of that underfunding to effectively be able to figure out how many of these things there are out there.