If if the magic of technology is serving us well, I think we're live now.
So while I can't see any of you, I believe that a large number of people that have joined us,
this is the second of two recent presentations coming out of our natural governance programme at the Martin School.
Some of you are with us to hear John Vucetich just a few weeks ago and the difference
between that very splendid talk and the equally splendid talk we're going to have now.
We're going to illustrate to you the breadth of our programme in this case.
I think my opening thought is that times have changed.
There was a time when there were plenty of really talented field biologists undertaking field ecology and trying to use it for conservation.
And it's a delight that Mohammed, who you're just going to hear from, Dr. Mohammed Virginia, is one of those talented field men.
But the way that times have changed is that nowadays that grit and talent and natural history skill in the field is not enough.
We need people who can take those data, interpret the concepts, the biological concepts behind them,
but more particularly lead them to practical application on the world stage.
And it's that spectrum of skills that you're about to hear Mohammed brings to to us today.
So what's going to happen next is that Mohammed is going to share his screen.
Magic will be done and [INAUDIBLE] make his presentation.
And afterwards we'll all rejoin the conversation and have the opportunity to ask him some questions.
If you want to ask a question, please write it in the ask a question tab and I'll try and decipher them at the end.
I would say, having done this a few weeks ago, that it makes it difficult when people's questions are really very long and complicated.
So if you can make them quite crisp, that that will ease me through the chairman there anyway.
Mohammed, it's a pleasure to have you here. Let's hear about Leppard's mountains and politics.
Thanks, David.
I'm super excited to give this talk and thanks to all walks of modern school for having me here, so I presume you should be able to see my slides.
Is that right? We can see them. OK, so now I'm the second one.
The second one. So let's start with a story. A few years ago, I received a text message.
I was sitting in my office in Oxford and the message was about this one, which you perhaps can see on this short video.
And it was a leopard coming down from the valleys into the Rangers call.
And the Rangers initially found it quite cool because she was close to the call.
And then they found that there should be a problem because she's she she has some sort of lack of consciousness.
So the idea was that, well, we need to capture and put it in a zoo.
And then the animal was sent to a local zoo in order to make sure that she would be fine.
But the problem was that she was far away from being fine, because you can see here immediately after translocation to a local zoo,
the animal is fed by hand from the local vet and there is no sense of fighting.
It seems that. So in that way, what happens? What's that?
It seems that the animal was not really good. So none of the vets were really hopeful that the animal could make it and to survive.
And I was thinking, well, we have some sort of unknown disease and it's it's a high density population of the leopard.
So what will what will happen for this leopards? Every day we have a new threat.
We have a new problem. We have a new challenge.
Is there any hope we can have for the future of these animals and perhaps other quite a city in West Asia and the Middle East?
So look at this map. This is the range of the leopards across the border, Africa and Asia.
So in Asia, they are not doing well, especially in the Middle East, where you can see the great many of the former range of the leopards lost.
Just 16 percent of the historic range is now occupied by the leopards.
So that's another gloomy idea that the habitat is not also too much available anymore, the disease habitat.
Now we have all challenges. Just look at the amount of terrorist attacks for the past couple of decades.
You can see the hotspots on the map and it's not far from the range of the Persian leopards in the Middle East.
So they are they need to cope with a combination of different challenges.
And it's also a challenge for the conservationists wanting to work on those landscapes.
So I would focus my study here just between the two hotspots in northern Iran and the area, which is called Corridor Transboundary Region.
It's shared between Iran and south Turkmenistan in north and partially Afghanistan.
So it's one of the safest place to think about leopards and perhaps conservation.
So we started using camera traps. The camera traps are some sort of technology which take a photo of any animal passing by.
So it enables us to understand how many leopards or any other animals which have some sort of
distinguishable marking to identify their numbers and individuals and estimate the population.
So shockingly, we were surprised to see such a high density of leopards in that area.
So it's a small area. So the area, it's just the three hundred fifty square kilometre and it's about six to one hundred square kilometres.
It scored one of the highest density the anywhere in Asia.
So it's perhaps just part of India has such a high density or perhaps no other region in Asia.
So that news became outrageous.
It went under cover of cover page of a number of newspapers, including this one that there are thirty five leopards detected in this national park.
And the question was, is that possible? Can you expect such a high density of leopards and such a small mountainous area?
And this sports event? Frankly speaking, it was a question for me how we can accommodate such a high density of leopards in tiny national park,
surrounded by too many villages and pastoral communities and people on roads.
How is that possible? Well, to do so, first, we need to understand how they behave in terms of movement.
Where are their home? Ranges will be six leopards with satellite collars.
And it took us three years and we found, yes, there is a huge range for each of these leopards.
And they have they each of them are confined to some to to a specific area,
which is called home or territory or they are not similar, but they have different levels of usage.
And then. We found, unsurprisingly, a huge Holmgren's for each of the leopards on average,
each level, each male was in an area of about one hundred square kilometre.
And then it added to the confusion. Why?
Because they study of the area of three hundred fifty two kilometres and then each homology up around one hundred square kilometres.
So we were thinking about thirty five leopards. So how is that possible with this, with such a high spatial requirement.
You can't have such a high density because the leopard needs space.
They can kill each other. They push each other off from the national park.
But the let's let's ask the data.
We found that most of the time for each leopard is spent in a tiny portion of that huge area, which is called the core area.
The core area is about 30 square kilometres. It's 30 percent of that huge range.
So in that way, the leopards are able to share space between each other.
They are able to share the whole range, but not the core, the core area.
So in that way, they would be able to share to share space across such a small mountainous landscape.
And the amount of overlap between the neighbours was about 40 percent.
So basically they are sharing the home range, but not the core area.
So let's look at what is happening inside the core area. Well.
Food, 90 percent of the kills are made inside the core area.
So basically what is happening is that leopards are a low, moderate overlap with the neighbours.
But had they had they enjoy exclusive hunting areas, which is actually the core area.
So they do not share that hunting area with the neighbours,
but they allow the others just to meander around them for that long as they are not killing and you prey.
So in that way, we would think, well. We can have a high density of the liberals because although they have large spatial requirements,
but at the same time most of the time and predation is confined to a tiny portion of that huge area, and that way we can accommodate larger numbers.
Well, that wasn't all. There was more exciting lessons to learn, and it was simply because it's mountings.
So this is one of the base camps. I spent 20 nights waiting for the letters to to pop in to pop up in one of the trucks.
They never showed up, sadly, for that 20 days.
And we we went back home with frustration and disappointment after 20 nights of no, no, no fire, no more healthy water, no no shower,
nothing but sitting in front of my tent every day, I was able to see ahead of these animals one of the prey, bizarre goat.
And they were able to they appeared in the morning just on this ridgeline in front of the camp,
and they started grazing down the valley all the way down the valley.
All the way down there, which there was a misprint, and after having some time there grazing around,
they went back all the way back up to the region and then disappeared. And this amount of time was about four or five hours.
I was thinking, well, if what happened, if I had the collar on one of these animals and what I was able to see was that,
well, they had some tiny movement around a point, not too much.
Well, they were not really active in the morning. This is what I could suggest, Judge, based on the colour, because it's just on X and Y axis.
But there is a third dimension.
They have spent lots of time moving downward, then upward, spend lots of energy and they have been very active for the whole morning.
So I was I was not able to detect that movement because simply I was ignoring the third dimension, which is the altitude and.
And that brought us more exciting understanding about leopards.
So imagine here, this is a mountain, obviously, and this is me with one of my colleagues searching for a laboratory.
And each leopard has its own range.
But at the same time, we realise that each leopard is killing prey on a different altitude.
So each one is two hundred metres higher or lower than the neighbours.
So in that way,
they are not they are not excluding others from their hunting areas or basically the core areas they are specifying into specific altitudes.
So in that way, they are able to have more separation from their neighbours.
And that was simply something which we ignored because we treated mountains like they are open plains.
And if we consider this third dimension into the calculation and quantification,
what would happen is that we are if we do not consider the third dimension, we would lose thirty five percent of the spatial requirement.
We basically we have we will have an underestimation of this space that the they need for their life.
So that's a key message. The message is that we shouldn't treat mountains like open plains.
The third dimension is an opportunity. It brings lots of heterogeneity in the landscape.
It enables us to share the landscape more efficiently in a way that do not interact with each other.
But at the same time, they are working on different altitudes in those landscape,
which we can see a huge step of gradient of altitude in a small area.
But it's not only about the ecology, it's also about the planning as well.
We simply ignore the altitude in planning as well in spatial planning.
So here we can see five different types of pray for deliverance from the left right.
You can see domestic dog shaped white peaks and then the union and those are goats.
But this is the exciting thing. The wild trees are killed on a higher altitude about four hundred metres higher than the other ones.
Wild wild pigs are everywhere. They are throughout villages as well.
But considering sheep and domestic dog, they are killed on a lower elevation on the lower altitude.
So what would happen is that when we want to try the donation, for example,
we want to put livestock somewhere while someone else and it's mostly done on a supply or any metric surface.
But ignoring the third dimension or actually the altitude is not really helpful because we can now understand.
Well, the altitude also matters a lot because we can zone on an elevation of gradient between between different individuals or within the populations.
So that's that's the other exciting thing.
Well, we understood we learnt about the leopards and how mountains provide an amazing opportunity for the leopards to share the landscape.
Even small mountainous landscape can harbour in this way high density of the leopards,
which is important because we know that the protected areas and national parks in mountainous landscapes are not very big.
It's not like southern African national parks. But you can we have hundreds of thousands of kilometres as protected area.
Many of them are just tiny, small, just a few dozens of square kilometres.
So in that way, there are still a huge opportunity for conservation because they can enter a population of these animals in high density.
And those ones, obviously, some of them would go beyond the national parks boundaries, but they can survive within even those smaller areas.
Obviously, if you always go for the larger ones that spotted, what, many times we can't.
So I think there's there's opportunity there. But apart from the ecology, what we realised was that there is transboundary movement.
Two of the Lepper two out of the six coloured Leprince, they spent the home ranges across the border.
They went from Iran into Turkmenistan. So and sometimes it was on a daily basis killing a prey on the Iranian side, resting on the Turkmen side.
And then you have this type of population or individuals in this case which are shared between two countries.
And you need to make sure that both countries are doing well, law enforcement legislation, public support,
everything is doing well because otherwise you have one individual which is protected, properly protected in the morning and in the afternoon.
He or she could be prone to any threats like poaching or anything else.
So that was a concern or perhaps an opportunity we will see later.
So we looked at the map of the leopard across Asia.
And we realise that it seems that there are not many countries which harbour more than five hundred liquids across the continent is perhaps just Iran,
India, Sri Lanka or perhaps China. Not to not not many countries.
So many Asian countries harbour just this small and tiny population, sometimes down to just a handful.
So. We focussed on four subspecies which are critically endangered or endangered, basically, they are treated.
And they are they are the Persian language from the west to the east, the Arabian leopard s Chinese and the amul in Russia and China.
So these four subspecies were the focus of the next study. And there is a huge amount of evidence out there showing the presence and
movement of this leopards across these transboundary areas like from top right.
I can see an Arabian leopard in Yemen, not far from the Oman border on the left.
That is a Persian leopard in the Caucasus in Azerbaijan.
And the name Putin there, which could be potentially from a land mine or snares or whatever or down below.
You can see the amul leopard in Russia, not far from the Chinese border or the other ones.
So there is an evidence out there and it's not. Just a few, there are many, there are lots of evidences.
So what we realised was that for 18 out of twenty three countries where these animals persist,
the majority of the leopard, which is just along the border,
basically they are not there are not too much habitat left inside those countries, which means that, well, the leopard,
the Asian leopard are like a like a border species and they are confined and limited to these borderlands.
So you can see, for example, in Southeast Asia, it's mostly around the border, again,
for the amount of leopard in which Russia and China and perhaps North Korea is exactly the same for the Arabian ones as well.
So it's like a border species and the range is shared between the countries which they need to protect together.
So what types of services these these transboundary areas can provide for the leopards?
Well, one is connectivity and movement. So, for example, in this example, you can see two green population nuclease operation leopards in Iran.
And what Iran should be happy that, well, the liberals are doing well.
I don't need any collaboration. But at the same time, the connexion between these green patches are gone through Azerbaijan, the neighbouring country.
So in that way, without having the international collaboration, without having the neighbours partnership,
even within the entire population, inside the country, could be scattered, could be fragmented and eventually go extinct.
So that's one way that we need to make sure that movement and connectivity is happening, sometimes just beyond the border, back into the country.
And the other one is recovery.
And as in the case of Russia and China, you can see both for the annual report on the Amazon Tiger that they are making a comeback from Russian fight.
And these yellow red patches show that they are coming back from Russia into China and spreading the wrench into the Chinese territory.
So that's another way that having the international collaboration and transparency movement can help the countries to to recover the population.
But there is always a challenge with speaking about borders and military activity and armed conflict, that's that's a huge problem.
You can see the amount of the human violence of armed conflict for the last few years, and many of them are happening in those borderlands.
And incidentally, Democrats are also there.
So that makes things much more complicated for not only the Pentagon, for people who wants to do some sort of conservation action.
The other one is neighbours have different priorities or different levels of legal protection, so.
For example, in the case of Thailand, they sought to protect a leopard in 1960, but not until 1994.
Cambodia and Myanmar announced the leopard as protected for thirty four years time lag between the two
countries that could have that would have a hampering effect on leopard conservation and survival.
So that's one way or the other case, which is for the Arabian leopard.
You can see here, Oman, nineteen seventy six. It announced the leopard as a protected species, but not until very recently.
Saudi Arabia and Yemen, they started to protect the leopards.
So you can see a leopard starting in one country is protected by popping up into the neighbouring country.
It can be shot without any persecution. There's no law to to to be enforced unless there is proper law enforcement.
So these time bugs can affect the leopard conservation.
And it's it's one of the challenges for the animals. We have also an emerging challenge.
And there is a number of border fences and barriers between countries.
In the case of this leopard, which was collared in Iran,
it started to disperse from Iran into Turkmenistan and eventually it was bounced in and bounced back to into the border fence,
which wasn't on the treatment side. So it is coming.
And when when a border fence could stop a leopard, it could stop anything because the leopards can climb everywhere.
They can pass everything they are. They aren't just agile and very capable of passing many barriers.
But if there is a border fence, which would stop them, that's a huge problem.
That's a huge challenge for them. And the other one, which is an emerging challenge, is the Belt and Road Initiative.
So belt and road initiative, as many of you are aware of, is a road which is coming out.
It has it's a it's a it's a sea road and also land road.
The landlord is started from China and affecting perhaps over 60 countries in the war going from Central Asia into the Middle East,
Turkey and eventually to to Europe. So the road could be good for local economy, hopefully.
But there is a challenge. It goes through some of the best habitats for leopards.
It's such a high density of these animals that you can see six, four,
eight individuals over one hundred square kilometre, not only the first, but also Bronner's.
And you can see again, such a high density of Brown was in the Caucasus region.
So what is the problem at the moment? Nothing. But people living in these areas with such a high density of these animals,
they suffer lots of conflict and they sometimes try to retaliate to kill them.
It's illegal everywhere for all these animals. But when you have this sort of Bahri, it could bring some potential customers into the market,
which people would ask from these local people, OK, shoot a leopard, Austenland.
But I would pay you. And in that way, the God that the herder or the local people would get rid of the leopard and at the same time would be paid.
So to do all the incentives. So that's that's, that's, that's a potential danger.
And if it was what happened in parts of Latin America for the Jaguars as well.
So that's the concern for the future, that this road could not only affect the fragment, the connectivity of the habitats,
but also at the same time affecting the population through increasing the poaching and illegal wildlife trade.
So what we can do, we can't protect everyone. We don't have that much money.
There are thousands of kilometres of border land where the weapons are there. But let's focus on five key areas and those five key areas.
So from the up from the east to the west is between Russia and China,
which already there is an ongoing project between Thailand and Myanmar for the for the vote in the
Chinese leopard and then between Oman and Yemen and finally in the Caucasus and cooperation between Iran,
Turkmenistan and Armenia. These are the countries which have a higher number of these transponder literate population
and are important for making sure that this transponder movement would persist.
The good news is that still two of them and two of them have ongoing projects in the Caucasus and also between Russia and China.
So three more needs some sort of action. But we all know that some countries are not happy with each other.
They don't talk to each other. And transboundary partnership essentially lies in part in collaboration and talking to each other.
So is that the end of the road? No, there is there is another way which is not as effective as multilateral collaboration,
but it can still help and it's in unilateral transboundary contribution.
What does that mean if countries are not happy to talk to each other?
For example, as in the case of Armenia and Azerbaijan, they can do their own share, which is each one can protect protected protected species,
can increase the number of protected areas, increase the law enforcement,
and it can be done under an umbrella of international organisations like Intel, for example.
In that case, it's WWF Caucasus. So in that way, each one is doing its share and the leppard's could potentially be recovered.
So, for example, in this case, you can see a leopard which move between the two countries, one hundred seventy kilometre.
And so it's possible to think about a unilateral transboundary conservation as long as each country is doing
its commitment and its contribution well enough to make sure that the animals could just pass the border.
So that's one way. The other implication for policy is that we need to make sure that monitoring is done jointly.
So imagine you have a shared population and you have one leopard in one side of the border counted, one then going to the other side counted again,
and eventually we would come up with a number which is inflated, which is overestimation when we think the population is doing well,
which is not doing well because we have overestimated and it's not realistic.
So, for example, in this case between China and Russia, they have this amazing project of counting leopards together.
And whenever they started to separate the data that it yielded 20 percent over
estimation than what should be counted as a combined approach between Russia and China.
So we need to make sure that monitoring are some sort of are done in a collaborative ways between the companies and the government.
Well. So far, I talked about the leopards and how mountains are important for the leopards,
even though they are small of the national park or protected areas,
but the heterogeneity provides amazing opportunity for these animals to to try to survive.
And then what are the challenges?
Because they need lots of space in terms of moving into countries and spanning across the country means that they need to collaborate.
Obviously, there are challenges, but it's not only about the leopards.
Is these transboundary areas where conservation also important for for the biodiversity as a whole was just for the leopards.
Let's see if you figured this is what countries were supposed to actually what the world is supposed to achieve by the end of last year,
2020, which is called Achutan target 11, 17 percent of the land to be protected by 2020.
And you can see that except Latin America and the Caribbean, the others are underperforming,
including Asia, and they are still far from the 17 percent.
Asia is about 13 percent to four percent away from the target.
So now countries are joining together this year to sign another agreement to achieve 30 percent of the land to be protected by 2030.
And in this simulation, you can see that if countries in Asia are different parts of Asia, if you focus on the red red lines,
if they keep the current trend, it's unlikely that any of them would achieve that 30 percent white, 20, 30.
And they need to increase at least two times the rate of increase of the protected areas if they want to make it happen by 20, 30.
Well, in a continent where we have over 60 percent of the world population, where we have one of the highest rate of land,
the conversion to agriculture and where we are supposed to have a larger number of humans in the next 40 or 50 years, how is that likely?
Not too much.
But Borderlands can still provide an opportunity because 80 percent of the Earth's border hotspots for transplanted wildlife are in Asia.
So Asia still has the opportunity to think about, well, inside the countries we want.
I mean, there are not too much space, but along the borders, there might be some opportunity just to fill that gap.
Obviously, we need to go for other options like lands. We don't want to protect everywhere as national forests strictly protected area.
There are other options like India, lands are governed by indigenous people or non-governmental areas.
So in that way, one one option would be to think about transboundary areas more robustly and is to the mind.
The Cabinet has recently shown if we consider for each Asian country, how much is the connectivity across the border or internally?
And there is a huge difference and protected areas or more connected across the border rather than inside the countries.
So it's not only about increasing the amount of land that's protected areas or to achieve that 30 percent.
It's also about the quality because those lands could be much more connected,
which is something it's crucial to make sure that the wildlife could survive and persist for the next.
A couple of centuries or forever, so that's important to think about.
Well, this this is transboundary areas are important to provide an opportunity to fill the gap.
Well, if you still wonder about what happened to the leopard horseshit, which I.
Initially introduced there, there is a good, good news for the animal.
So for those of you who joined us, not from the beginning, it was a leopard which was captured in northeastern Iran in a national park.
You can see. And she was translocated to a local local zoo because she was not doing well,
and you can see here that she had no sense of fighting, just hand fed and without any aggression.
And nobody was hopeful that the animal could make it the animal to survive. Well, the good news is that she was good.
She was recovered after four months of treatment and eventually she was released back into Dubai.
And after four months, she was part of the gang and she was doing well.
So that's that's a happy it's a happy ending for for this leopard.
So with this happy ending, I would like to thank all the collaborators,
colleagues and friends who helped to help pay for this series of studies for the last couple of years and more importantly,
the Oxford Martin School and the Department of Zoology, in particular, David MacDonald, for supporting me and having me here.
And thank you for listening. Thank you.
Thank you, Mohammed. And I think that everybody is now back with us and at least on my screen, I can see you, that was a wonderful talk.
And of course, what's exciting about it is you went from individual insights or insights into individual animals,
even that nice story of the rescue through to wide geopolitics.
I should have said at the beginning, I suspect a lot of people in the audience grew up with the idea that while lots of big mammals,
lots of big carnivores in trouble are in trouble,
leopards are somehow an exception thought of as being so adaptable to the sort of equivalent of red foxes in the UK that can live anywhere.
And we know about the the urban leopards in big Indian cities.
So I suspect it would have come as quite a shock to some people in the audience to see just how badly leopards are doing in Asia.
And I should mention that amongst our colleagues, for example, we have just recently and it's tragic,
documented in camera trapping studies, the disappearance of the lost leopards remain protected area in Laos.
And we have colleagues at this moment, right at this moment, documenting what may be the demise of the lost leopards in Cambodia.
So so the remarkable results you've shown for Iran and some of those transboundary areas really are bucking a trend.
And if if people didn't fully perceive it, they should realise that we're now looking at this extraordinary,
charismatic animal being confined to just a few tiny places in in Asia.
So, Mohammed, the key thing that comes out of your work is the importance of these transboundary areas.
And so many leopard populations that do survive are in those transboundary areas.
Just say a little bit more to us about what it is about those areas that makes them suitable for the leopards.
Is it something about the areas themselves or something about the absence of people in those areas?
The combination of the two. What can we learn from that? Yeah, that's a good question.
I think the there are a number of factors which has come to have contributed to this to this situation.
One is it seems that countries are more happy to spend money for development inside the countries not far that far in the borders.
So in that way, while there are still intact areas left along the borders and the other one is in some cases, we have military conflicts.
And when you have these border issues, border disputes or military conflict between the governments or countries in that way,
nobody would go there to invest in development. So still, there are lots of habitats left and some leopards could survive the situation.
But at the same time, I think it could be in a way, you thought that the year each country started to announce the protection.
So I think some countries were more able to protect the leopards that they provided a source for the other ones and the other ones,
even though they lost the leopard inside those countries, like, for example, many Caucasian countries, not much lost, but not too much left,
they were able to disperse or recover from the Iranian side or between the Russia and China.
Each they show the recovery from the threat from the Russian side.
So this imbalance between protection was helpful for the neighbouring countries just to think some some leopards in their territory.
But it's still I think it's there is no general rule.
It's very context dependent. But the good thing is that there are some habitats out there like supporting animals along the borders.
Thank you, Mohammed.
I think now we should move to the questions that people have been leaving in the chat and there's a lot of them and I can see that those questions,
some of them are about biology and some of them are about the geopolitics of of of leopard conservation.
But the very first one I feel I have to give pride of place to is to our colleague
in the world who is marvellously for this occasion named Flora Leopard.
So in honour of her surname, resonating so strongly with your talk, I'm going to make her question the first.
And it's a biological one. She says, I'm thinking of the altitude, more separation that was such a major part of your discoveries.
Was there a relationship between sex and altitude?
For example, there's one sex before higher altitude to the others.
Yeah, that's a good question. We compared this one in a in a in a system with only males because we were so keen to understand.
We knew that this interaction between males could be very aggressive. So we wanted to know if males are excluding each other or not.
And we didn't. We have we had only one young female in our sample size, which probably is about logic, isn't it?
But we have five males, which at the same time call it all adult primates, or they were sharing the whole national park between each others.
And we were able to understand how this altitude sports between them.
But for females or females and males, we don't know yet. Very good.
And now to jump to a completely different scale of question,
this one from Amy Fitzmaurice and a lot of other people have voted, as it were, for this question.
You you point out to us the importance of these transboundary areas.
And so now we know that's what matters.
But what can we do and what can be done to improve transboundary conservation, which presumably by its very nature, is extremely challenging.
So what practical steps do you think could realistically be taken?
Yeah, so I think one way is to focus on those five key areas which are extremely important,
and without them we would lose a couple of countries in terms of leverage.
So that's the spatial planning on our side, which as conservation is.
What I think is that this collaboration between the scientists and biologists is crucial between the neighbouring governments.
And it happens a lot that it goes through international treaties or convention.
So one example is the Convention on Migratory Species, which is part of the union,
and that's the key example for this sort of migratory or nowadays transboundary species, which is very helpful.
So that's why countries are able to sit together, plan together, share the data,
develop joint monitoring programme, and then decide together what and how should be protected.
So that's one way and the other one. Finally, I think it's important to let the countries know that the situation of the animals
call the central governments how they cope with these transboundary things,
because many of them are obviously focussing on their own territory as a country.
But the leopards. No, no, no, no, no border.
They are just moving between the border.
So it's important to let them know that if we are doing some sort of fencing along our border wall or whatever or any development,
it can potentially affect populations. And our populations, not the neighbours, can potentially affect our populations as well.
Good, and to continue jumping back and forth between questions about big scale and small scale,
people are fascinated to know about that sick leopard taken into captivity.
And then very luckily, we have militated.
Did you ever find out what the pathogen was? Yes, it was I mean,
initially it was supposed is keen on December because there was a high prevalence
of Cain undisciplined distemper in the local box and that was the concern.
But later on, it was not it was negative for the Cain on and then it was found in bacteria in the plot,
which I am not fully aware of, what was the exact name? But it was a bacteria which was high at high level.
And then they went through some sort of treatment and eventually she showed some sort of aggression consciousness and was able to go back to the one.
But yeah, I think at the end, people were thinking at this stage that, well,
the animal looks fine and it seems that there is no major threat to the animal because in terms of distemper or rabies or whatever.
So they decided, well, it's not good anymore to keep it in captivity.
Let's just bring it back into the water. And then she was released and luckily she was spotted again after four months.
Very good. So now back to policy, Akash Gurung has asked a very popular question about what initiatives and policies are being implemented
in Iran by the government as a result of your findings and to to try and conserve the weapons.
Well, the CMW, a combination of migratory species, recently announced the leopard as part of this programme,
which is which provides more support for transboundary conservation and collaboration between the countries and the Persian leopard,
was one of the recent one, at least so along with a couple of other scholars in Iran as well as neighbouring countries.
We were able to put and draughted a proposal which eventually just ended up that the leopard was able to.
The to receive more support.
So now it's so now it's at this stage that there are some collaboration, there has to be started between Iran, Turkmenistan and other countries.
There is a peace park, which was not based on my study about this and the whole thing that me and several other colleagues,
they were telling that this transparency movement is an important thing for
the left and the peace park is established between Iran and Armenia in order.
Not necessarily. Very good.
And actually, that blends into a question from our colleague, Isha,
and he mentions peace talks and says more generally, do you think peace talks have an important role to play?
Yeah, I'm definitely I think with the rising amount of conflict and disputes the seen amongst Asian countries
and more and higher number of people in coming years to be born and leaving those countries,
I think struggling for natural resources would be inevitable.
So these peace bogs or transboundary areas of water can also not only serve the animals to have more land protected for them
and also also to serve people in order to just have peace in a way to promote peace and sympathy between people as well.
So now an ecological question, people are interested to know whether there's another rare field in Iran is the cheetah.
Is there any overlap between the cheetah and the leopards?
Any competition between is one perhaps a problem for the other?
Yet there are a few areas in which both occur in the same area.
And interestingly, a few years ago, two cheetahs were collared in Iran,
essentially one and one of them was killed by another leopard, by a leopard, which at the same time he was also cornered.
So the guy that the cheetah was killed.
But it seems that it's not a huge problem because most of the cheetah range does not have leopards nowadays in Iran.
So it seems that we need to seek for more human caused problem for the cheetahs.
Now, so back to back to the geopolitics, Alyona asks,
Do you see any solutions to the problem of those border fences which are so impenetrable defences that are there because governments want them there?
Is that simply something you could do nothing about? Well, when I saw that letter dispersing from Iran with the cheapest colour, I was thinking.
Don't go to Turkmenistan because you are taking my Jeep, my my guitar,
and when went into Turkmenistan and bounced to the to the border fence and found, well, the animal was bouncing back towards Iran.
So I found, well, if a fence could stop a leopard, what we can do for the other animals and it seems are countries like Turkey.
They're spending loads of money on having proper walls and border fences.
And so I think that was an example between I guess it was Mongolia and China which did remove the
fence as part of this border just for the better movement of ungulates by coolants or ghazals.
But I think that was an extreme example for many other places.
I don't know how we can remove the fences without compromising the governance and the sovereignty of the countries.
It might be able to use the technology in the future to detect some that the trespass, but not the animals.
So hopefully technology would find a way.
But it seems that countries are really doing well in terms of establishing and creating good walls, border fences.
There you go. Now, Mohammed, I know that you've worked on a different topic, which is aspects of human wildlife conflict involving leopards.
And so we asked a question about that.
Perhaps you could comment a little bit on on human wildlife conflict,
but also possibly ask the question, is there a perverse outcome round the corner?
Because if you are doing well, conserving these leopards, is there going to be a greater conflict problem?
So so I'm not sure if I answered the question very well, can I say it again?
Well, firstly, maybe you could talk a little bit about your work on human wildlife conflict involving the leopards, any depredation on the coast.
The second question was, if the leopards become more numerous, is that going to cause a second set of problems with them being more problematic to.
Good question. So for the first one, when we call our six leopards, only one of them was engage in serious human wildlife conflict.
Look at people. And actually, it was a very old male tooth were almost gone.
And he killed 15 dogs. He was a dog lover and he killed 15 dogs in in one year, along with a couple of sheep,
so and goats so and he was great in stealing dogs from people just going to the
villages thinking like going to the grocery and nobody was able to detect him.
He was very careful. But the rest, the other five, they never committed any any any conflict.
So it brought the idea that, well, we have a population. People think about what these leopards are killing our animal.
But eventually it's not the whole population. It's just one individual or two.
So that's the ideal problem. Individuals which are killing disproportionately in terms of the number of animals.
But going to the next question. Well, yes, I think if when we look at the map of the protected areas,
we have conflict more or less in places where we have the leopards, where we have where we have protected the leopards.
So conflicts somehow could be a product of conservation in a way, because in that way we are protecting animals,
getting older and they need they need to leave their territory hungry.
So they go to the people and the livestock and eventually they think the cost problem.
So having more leopards, yes, it can provide more problems.
But I think what is needed is not having more or less that is just a breeding population which is actually
stable or not showing huge fluctuation across the time that causes any concern about the survival.
Very good. So here's here's an interesting question that Matt Matt,
Matt Lucky has asked Have economic studies assessed direct or indirect financial values of the protected areas covering the territories?
And depending on what you say, Mohammed, I'll explain what Matt has in mind.
It's a longer question. Yeah, OK. So I think the most important thing is the direct interaction of.
Leopards and people, which has financial concern for people.
So that's one aspect that we need to have more financial studies from the people's perspective.
And at the same time, we need to understand fight there the conservation spending,
which is amongst the other types of financial study of how much how much money we are spending
for these lands in terms of protection or having people excluded sometimes in national parks.
So that's why we need we need to understand about different types of the ecosystem in a way that fine.
How much financial each one costing.
So I can think about this, the whole conservation and also human wildlife conflict in terms of these these two things.
OK, so so just to give you a sense of what he was thinking about is that if economic studies
had estimated the financial values of those protected areas that covered the territories,
then a mechanism for conservation, he says very nicely.
Finance the landscape, protect the leopard, could be sovereign, green and green bond markets that could offer a mechanism to finance the the goals.
So that's a topic to be developed, I think. Yeah.
Yeah, that's a nice idea. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I'm just looking for our next question, though, um.
So Herculaneum Marina asks again, considering the importance of Borderlands for conservation.
Do you think there are enough international initiatives?
And of course, funding inevitably for transboundary conservation.
I mean, have have enough people cottoned on to the results that you've been coming up with and done something about it now?
Yeah, I think yeah. That we don't have enough resources.
For this transponder thing, because I think most of the time it should come from international donors,
particularly because each country is not really helpful to help the other one,
because each of them are reliant on their own already limited resources.
So that's a problem because they need to pitch the idea to international donors.
And it's already it's not too much money in the market for conservation. So that's one problem.
But I think what the case of Armenia, Azerbaijan showed is that the unilateral transboundary conservation,
which is well, if you don't want to collaborate with your neighbour, just protect what you have, what you have.
And what if you have this target of protecting 17 percent or 30 percent, just protect and make sure that some of them are not from the border.
So in that way, animals would find a way just to move across the border. It has its own drawbacks.
Like we are not monitoring together. We are not sharing the data.
But at the end of the day, animals will find some ways to connect it in a way to just to have this transponding movement.
But I'm quite agree. We don't have too much money and resources for this in this new era of conservation and transparency conservation.
So I'm I've got another question for you before we get to it.
I meant to make a public announcement, as it were. At this point, I think people are looking at their screens.
We'll see to the bottom of the screen screens a questionnaire which is an opportunity
to fill in in the closing minutes of this talk or immediately afterwards. And the reason it's there is that we were fortunate,
Mohammed was fortunate to get a grant from the university looking at public engagement with research.
And you, the audience, have just been engaging with Mohammed's research.
And so the people organising that initiative and the university are very keen to get your reactions to what you've heard today.
So please, I think it's a short, quick question to see if you can just fill it in while we're in the last moments of of this seminar.
So, Mohammed, there's a question which may be our last one.
We've only got five minutes left before we all turn into pumpkins or something.
Dramatic happens on the iting.
And it's a question from Amy Fitzmaurice, and she's very interested to know more about the attitudes of the local people to these leopards.
Do they regard them positively or negatively? And is the work to be done in terms of public perceptions about the.
So leopards are sympathetic with wolves and wolves kill more from people, so people are more angry with the wolves and what less to the leopards?
But we realise that even people. Who are losing more animals to the wolves?
They tend to be more negative toward the leopards as well, which means that people have financial concerns no matter who is killing their animals.
They would be mad at any animal which is causing a problem.
So in a as a as a single species, if we consider the leopard are doing well, we are happy.
But when we consider it as a context of sympathy,
carnivores in the field of carnivores killing more devils are affecting the people's attitude towards the leopards.
If they kill more people are getting more negative towards a leopard does not.
So that was an interesting thing we realised from working with people around those habitats.
Very good. And Mohammed, do you think that you could within two and a half to three minutes,
give an answer to Justin about how climate change might shift the altitude or situation of those Leppard's?
Yeah, we expect that animal to start to move upward in the mountains.
So that's that's what we heard from from the media and also the papers.
What would happen is that it seems that leopards would be more condensed in terms
of having less altitude available because people would also come up for this.
So they have less areas available because they can't fly. They can still stick to the peaks.
So in that way, it seems that we we might expect more interaction,
more interspecies interaction between the leopards because they can't share anymore in that way as they are doing now.
So that's one way. The other one is prey also could be more mixed, like Eurail and Baesler goats.
So there are two types of prey which are somehow some sort of niche segregation.
So in that way, the euro would go into the virtual gold habitats more and more.
And because they are pushed from downward. And then in that way, what would happen is that there is competition between the two species,
which might which might affect the survival of any for both of them and might reduce the number of available prey for the long term as well.
And eventually speaking about people coming apart.
It seems that more livestock and more more dogs also want more domestic animals
would be available for the leopards in the future because of the climate change,
because they should go up first in order to find more fresh pastures for their animals.
And the leopards aren't there. So there would be a higher chance to for human wildlife conflict.
But all of these are just speculations just based on what we think now.
And I don't have any empirical evidence to prove any of this.
And I think Justin's question about the methods and it might apply have a different answer in different areas.
For example, in the Himalayas or something is a very general one for for high altitude species.
Just thinking of of of our own groups work.
Ethiopian wolves are probably going to have to travel north, maybe off the top of the mountain tops to oblivion.
As agriculture moves up hillsides, Arctic foxes have been documented,
moving higher and higher up mountains as red foxes are able to move behind them, pushing them forward.
So it's a general phenomenon. Mohammed, thank you. This has been such an interesting session.
And I think a key thing to say to the audience just before we all to speak figuratively in our private spaces, you would hear us,
but we'll be doing it, is that there was a time when biology seemed to be all that you needed to understand to deliver conservation.
But we now understand that biology of which you've done a lot is necessary but not sufficient.
You need to look much more broadly at topics involving the human dimension and as you've shown us, geopolitics.
So thank you so much for an excellent talk.
As I say, one of the the unsolved shortcomings of a meeting of this sort over a resume lending there it has
been is that you can't hear the riotous applause that is now going on in houses around Oxford.
And indeed, I can see from the people who've been here from around the world.
But just imagine that applause. Thank you very much. And you magicians at the mountain school who've made all this work.
So that's it.