Human-induced behavioral tradeoffs lead to a modified spatiotemporal niche in African lions

Background/Question/Methods

Across their range, African lions (Panthera leo) must adaptively navigate a heterogeneous landscape of risk and resources created by habitat degradation, prey depletion, and conflicts with humans over livestock. In addition to causing population declines that threaten lion persistence, these pressures can produce tradeoffs between food and safety that modify lion spatiotemporal behaviors and disrupt their function as apex predators. Variation in risks and resources across sites likely produces non-uniform lion responses to human pressures across populations and habitats, making it difficult to predict the ecological consequences of human disturbance. To understand how humans impact lion behaviors (and thus their ecological function) across Africa, we conducted a systematic meta-analysis of 19 studies across 26 sites that evaluated spatiotemporal lion responses to human disturbance. We also assessed the extent to which these responses are influenced by tradeoffs between anthropogenic risks and resource availability.

Results/Conclusions

We found that African lions consistently avoided the pressures of human-dominated landscapes both spatially and temporally, limiting lions’ spatiotemporal niche and likely reducing their ecological impacts as predators. However, lion responses to human disturbances appear to be mediated by the intensity of human disturbance and the production of livestock at each study site, including generally stronger avoidance behaviors at sites with higher livestock production. Our results indicate that lions are modifying their spatiotemporal activity in response to human disturbances, producing increased risks of conflict at sites with higher disturbance. This highlights the importance of mitigating human-lion conflict as human pressures increase across Africa.