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      Social Structure of Lions ( Panthera leo) Is Affected by Management in Pendjari Biosphere Reserve, Benin

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          Abstract

          Lion populations have undergone a severe decline in West Africa. As baseline for conservation management, we assessed the group structure of lions in the Pendjari Biosphere Reserve in Benin. This reserve, composed of one National Park and two Hunting Zones, is part of the WAP transboundary complex of protected areas. Overall mean group size was 2.6±1.7 individuals (n = 296), it was significantly higher in the National Park (2.7±1.7, n = 168) than in the Hunting Zones (2.2±1.5, n = 128). Overall adult sex ratio was even, but significantly biased towards females (0.67) in the National Park and towards males (1.67) in the Hunting Zones. Our results suggest that the Pendjari lion population is affected by perturbations, such as trophy hunting.

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          Author and article information

          Contributors
          Role: Editor
          Journal
          PLoS One
          PLoS ONE
          plos
          plosone
          PLoS ONE
          Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
          1932-6203
          2014
          8 January 2014
          : 9
          : 1
          : e84674
          Affiliations
          [1 ]Laboratory of Applied Ecology, University of Abomey-Calavi, Cotonou, Benin
          [2 ]Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Zoology, University of Oxford, Tubney, United Kingdom
          [3 ]Panthera, Kongola, Caprivi Region, Namibia
          [4 ]Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands
          University of Tasmania, Australia
          Author notes

          Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

          Conceived and designed the experiments: ES GDS BS HDI. Performed the experiments: ES HB PF. Analyzed the data: ES HB AL. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: PF BS GDS HDI. Wrote the paper: ES HB AL.

          Article
          PONE-D-13-20606
          10.1371/journal.pone.0084674
          3885576
          5b1c3f6b-d7bc-4f47-92fd-f9df1e800237
          Copyright @ 2014

          This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

          History
          : 16 May 2013
          : 17 November 2013
          Page count
          Pages: 4
          Funding
          This study was part of the PhD project of the first author, ES. Her scholarship costs were covered by the Dutch Organisation for Cooperation in Higher Education (NUFFIC). All operational costs for the collection of data for the present paper were covered by the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
          Categories
          Research Article
          Biology
          Ecology
          Ecological Metrics
          Population Size
          Behavioral Ecology
          Biodiversity
          Conservation Science
          Population Biology
          Population Metrics
          Effective Population Size
          Population Size
          Zoology
          Mammalogy
          Earth Sciences
          Geography
          Human Geography
          Nature and Society Interactions
          Social and Behavioral Sciences
          Geography
          Human Geography
          Nature and Society Interactions

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