Wildlife tourism rangers could be a “powerful” force in conservation monitoring, according to the results of a research project in Uganda.

Surveying wildlife is a costly and difficult part of conservation. But this project, done with African lions in Uganda, found that local rangers were well-equipped to dramatically improve the data.

A paper describing the study, by an international team of researchers and Ugandan rangers, is published in Communications Biology.

“What you’ll typically find in a lot of these research settings in Africa and Asia is, to be quite blunt, rangers are often used as security personnel,” lead author Dr Alexander Braczkowski, a conservation biologist at Griffith University, tells Cosmos.

“They don’t really have much collaborative inclusion in this process, so that they themselves can jump into the scientific process.”

This is at odds with their expertise, according to Braczkowski.

“There’s more than 250,000 rangers that are installed in the global conservation force, and they obviously have immensely close and intimate relationships with wildlife and wild places. They probably know these places better than anybody.”

The project was part of a larger survey, establishing African lion populations across Uganda.

“We did workshops, and we taught a very wide variety of stakeholders, essentially, how to survey lions,” says Braczkowski.

At one site, Murchison Falls National Park, Braczkowski and colleagues worked with rangers from the Uganda Wildlife Authority.

“They have a very, very, very intimate understanding of lion behaviour, where lions are hiding, which thickets they’re using, spatially, which parts of the landscapes they’re occurring in,” says Braczkowski.

“This was the first scientific study of wildlife where I directly participated and my first entry point into science,” says co-author Lilian Namukose, a ranger with the Wildlife Authority.

“Through rigorous training in three workshops across three national parks, we quickly learnt to incorporate lion data collection alongside our daily field duties.”

Namukose and her colleague, co-author Silvan Musobozi, recorded 102 detections of lions across 76 days, giving the researchers valuable ecological data. These included multiple photos of each lion, so that the researchers could identify individuals.

For comparison, the team also set up 64 expensive infra-red camera traps in the area. These state-of-the-art devices recorded 2 usable detections over 1,601 nights.

The team concludes that tapping into ranger knowledge can improve both ecological data, and give rangers an opportunity to be more involved in conservation research and management decisions.

“You could just get so much more return on investment by bringing rangers into the scientific process,” says Braczkowski.

“Through capacity building and training, rangers can be better incorporated into the scientific and management process,” says Musobozi. By