“I’m increasingly realising that nobody likes an ecological tax man,” says Dr Alexander Braczkowski.

“Nobody likes to hear bad results.”

Braczkowski, a conservation biologist at Griffith University, has been involved in a thorough audit of large carnivores in Uganda – and while the result isn’t uniformly bad, he says there is a lot that’s troubling.

“The situation is pretty dire in 2 of the 3 protected areas that still have lions,” he tells Cosmos.

Lions (Panthera Leo) are listed as vulnerable across their range by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). According to the IUCN, the population has declined by roughly 30% in the last 2 decades, with fewer than 25,000 remaining in the wild.

In Kidepo Valley National Park, Braczkowski and colleagues estimated there are just 12 lions left, 22 including the surrounding community lands. In Queen Elizabeth National Park, there are fewer than 40. This is a rapid decline since the last survey.

“Lions have basically gone functionally extinct under everybody’s nose, but nobody was really paying attention,” says Braczkowski of these areas.

But the wildlife survey did find some places where animals were doing better.

“In Murchison Falls, which is in the north of the country, you have commercial oil extraction in the park, but you still have 240 lions somehow. So that’s pretty remarkable,” says Braczkowski.

“Hyena populations are doing pretty darn good, it seems, across the country. It could be because lions have come under a lot of pressure in these systems… And then they’re also a lot more resilient.”

These trends are similar to those found in other African countries. Leopards, meanwhile, are a “mixed bag”.

“In some places, they’re doing well. In some other places, they’re doing okay, but obviously not as badly as lions.”

The wildlife survey, which draws on the work of more than 100 local and international stakeholders, aims to plug a data gap spanning nearly 2 decades.

“It represents one of the biggest, among the biggest wildlife censuses ever done in Uganda,” says Braczkowski.

“What’s increasingly the case in a lot of African protected areas, is that you don’t have strong scientific capacity to be able to do these kinds of surveys on a regular basis. That’s why you have a survey done nearly two decades ago, and then the next survey you do, the lions have basically disappeared – like what happened in Kidepa.”

Braczkowski has been working with a team to improve the capacity of local university students, rangers, and independent scientists to conduct ecological surveys, so that they won’t be so reliant on “very unreliable funding opportunities”.

“We really want this to be home-based, led by Ugandans, as much as we can, so that we can get a relatively consistent picture of how these things are doing over time.”

The data is critical for learning what is at risk – and for the populations to have any hope of recovery, according to Braczkowski.

He says governments can take different actions in different places to curb carnivore loss.

“I think every protected area in Uganda is vastly different in terms of its challenges.

“In Queen Elizabeth National Park, one of the biggest problems there is you have about 60,000 people that are living inside the national park, and you have thousands of cows that are spread across the 11 fishing villages. I think the government needs to take some bold action in getting those cows out of the park.”

“If you look at a place like Kidepo Valley, there we’ve seen targeted poaching of lions. Our survey teams found 3 dead lions in the space of 3 months, in a population where we only estimated 12 individuals.

“And then in places like Murchison, you have wire snare poaching that’s taking up the prey base and the lions themselves. But as I say, there you actually still have some hope, because lions are coming off a much higher baseline value.”

The results of the survey are published in Global Ecology and Conservation.