 Hi, I'm Phaedra Kress, the managing editor of Conservation Letters, and I'm excited today to be joined by Guy Baum. He is the author of our featured article for our January-February issue entitled, Failure of Research to Address the Range-Wide Conservation Needs of Large Carnivores, Leopards in South Africa, a Case Study. Guy, thanks so much for joining us. Pleasure, Phaedra. And Guy is the director of Panthera's Leopard Program at Panthera, based in New York, and we're talking today with him from South Africa. And Guy, can you give us a little bit of background on you? Sure. As you mentioned, I live in the beautiful city of Cape Town, but I work for Panthera. Panthera is a U.S.-based charity which funds and oversees projects on different cat species all over the world. I head up their leopard program. I studied leopards for my PhD. This was here in South Africa in northern Quasaruna Till, which is on the east coast of South Africa. And I've since remained involved in leopard research and in leopard conservation here in South Africa and more widely across the species range ever since. Excellent. Thank you so much. So let's dive into a few questions about the article. And again, we're so pleased to have you here with us. Can you give us a brief overview of the study? Sure. I guess the study originally stemmed from the fact that science and conservation often seem to be driven by different agendas. And I think this is partly because many researchers, particularly those from academia, appear reluctant to tackle some of the applied topics which are often perceived to be less competitive for publishing or too impractical to study. Now, because of this, research often seems to fail to contribute to real-world conservation and in this paper, we use leopards here in South Africa as a case study to illustrate this mismatch between research and conservation priorities and to look for ways to bridge this disconnect, this research implementation gap, I guess you may call it. Great. And so I thought it would be interesting for our viewers to start out if you could supply an ecology of the leopard. So give us the basics. Sure. Leopards are a very adaptable species. They have the largest geographic range of any of the large cats. They found from the Cape Peninsula, so where I live right through our sub-Saharan Africa into the Middle East, across much of tropical Asia. And across a lot of this range, they occur in much closer proximity to people than any other large carnival. And so there's an assumption that leopards don't warrant much conservation concern. And yet we've still seen that leopards like many other large carnivals, they've suffered a significant reduction in range. I think in sub-Saharan Africa alone, it's estimated that they've lost about 37% of their historical range and this is probably great in places like Asia and the Middle East. So there certainly are a species that warrants our attention. Absolutely. So in the study and the research that you did, what would you say are the primary findings? Well, what we did is we evaluated past trends in leopard research and so we undertook an extensive literature review, this is of the scientific literature, and we were able to show that leopard studies in South Africa focused disproportionately on basic or pure research. That's research which is mostly theoretical in nature, focusing on behavior and leopard ecology. Almost two thirds I think of the papers that we found, these are studies undertaken in South Africa on leopards, had almost no practical application whatsoever. So most of these papers tended to focus on leopard feeding ecology, there was a lot of duplication in research efforts, and in particular on leopard diet in sites more protected areas. Now most leopard range here in South Africa and elsewhere in their distribution extends beyond protected areas, and this is obviously where the cats are at greatest risk. So there seems to be a disconnect where the research is happening and where the need is greatest. We also showed that many leopard studies were not publishing their findings. I think we found 39 projects that are currently active on researching leopards in South Africa and only 19 of these have never contributed to the scientific literature, even though many have been active for over 10 years. And why is that? Do you think they're not publishing as prolifically as other researchers? I think specifically in South Africa it probably is a result of the booming volunteer industry that we have. This is the volunteer tourism industry. We have many, many small private reserves in South Africa and they lend themselves to research projects on charismatic species like leopards. A lot of this, and our study showed this, but a lot of this research is funded by commercial volunteer operations. This is where late people pay to have the opportunity to experience and assist with research. It's a great way to fund research in a climate where these types of resources are increasingly limited, but unfortunately it seems often the motivation for these studies is ready to enable and facilitate a commercial operation rather than to provide research for management needs. So there's very little oversight. I think that's the main issue here locally. Great. So you kind of touched on this just now. The next thing we wanted to know was why do you think the leopard research is so poorly matched to leopard conservation, particularly in South Africa? I think leopards is just a case study for probably a much wider problem. I think conservation generally, and I know this because I'm a quasi-academic myself, but I think it's often regarded, conservation biology is often regarded as a soft science. It's difficult sometimes to fit these applied topics to rigorous experimental designs. Sometimes the sample sizes are small. They don't lend themselves to robust statistical analyses. And because of it, academics often perceive conservation biology as less competitive when it comes to publishing in high-impact journals. And as we all know, this is one of the main metrics when it comes to gauging academic performance. Now, thankfully, we were actually able to refute this in this case when the context of leopard research in South Africa we showed through our literature review that those applied studies on leopards were generally published in much higher-impact journals than were basic leopard studies. Great. So why do you think that publications from countries outside of South Africa focus more on applied issues when one would imagine that managing leopards within South Africa could be expected to have the greatest need for information to support active management? It's a good question. I'm not 100% sure. I think it probably stems back to what I was talking about, volunteer organizations, the fact that we have so many small reserves across the country, this is a result of some very encouraging wildlife legislation which devolved the user rights of wildlife to private land ownership. So we have all these conservancies which were created. And as I say, these small conservancies lend themselves to research. And everyone wants to research a charismatic species. And leopards are the one large carnivore fond across most of the country. And so they do, though. They're attractive when it comes to volunteer organizations. They're attracted to universities looking to raise funding. And again, charismatic species are easy to raise funding for research than most other species. And the leopards the best candidate in this country. Got it. Speaking of large carnivores in general, how would you apply what you've learned in your research here more broadly to all large carnivore researchers or studies? Well, I guess that, is this in terms of recommendations or our findings? Well, both, please. Okay. Well, like I say, I think our case study is probably symptomatic of a wider problem where carnivore researchers, wildlife researchers often fail to contribute to meaningful conservation on the ground. And I'm not by any means suggesting that we need to basically discount with pure academic research. And we need to understand species and ecosystems to be able to protect them. But I do think that we need a better balance between applied research and basic or pure research. And that's across the board for all species. And I think what we've shown here with leopards, like I say, it seems to be prevalent, certainly the fact that much research is happening inside protected areas. It happens in places which are not necessarily where research is most needed, but it's where it's most easily implemented. And that's the case for cheetahs. And I think you'd find that for many other large carnivores in Africa and elsewhere. Great. So in the last minute or so that we have to talk today, could you wrap up for us and give us the key takeaways that if you were trying to do a little elevator speech of your research, you meet someone and you want to kind of have them leave with a few takeaways that could potentially help their own research or broaden their understanding of the hard work that you've done, what would you say? Sure. I think there's this research implementation gap, which we documented. It's been described before. But I think what was neat about this particular study is that we showed that there's no real sound reason for its existence. We showed that applied studies are as competitive when it comes to publishing. They are practical to undertake. We actually showed that applied studies were conducted over shorter time periods in basic research. And so I think that researchers that show initiative, they start tackling these applied issues, which are relevant to the wider public, will be rewarded. And this is both professionally and personally. I like seeing my research published in strong journals like Conservation Letters, but my best sense of accomplishment is certainly when I get to see my research making a difference on the ground. Excellent. Well, we should also let our listeners know that the cover of our January-February issue is a beautiful picture of a leopard that you've supplied to us. So we're very grateful for that. And thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much.