Paul J. Funston

TL;DR: This article defined African savannahs as being those areas that receive between 300 and 1,500mm of rain annually and defined lion areas as places that likely have resident lion populations using high-resolution satellite imagery and human population density data.

TL;DR: This work relates African lion population densities and population trends to contrasting management practices across 42 sites in 11 countries to show that lions in unfenced reserves are highly sensitive to human population density in surrounding communities, and unfenced populations are frequently subjected to density-independent factors.

TL;DR: Almost all lion populations that historically exceeded ∼500 individuals are declining, but lion conservation is successful in southern Africa, in part because of the proliferation of reintroduced lions in small, fenced, intensively managed, and funded reserves.

TL;DR: This analysis shows dramatic declines of cheetah across its distributional range, supporting an uplisting of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List threat assessment to endangered.

TL;DR: The lion Panthera leo is one of the world's most charismatic carnivores and one of Africa's key predators as discussed by the authors, and its recent evolutionary history is characterized by patterns of molecular genetic variation in multiple maternal (mtDNA), paternal (Y-chromosome), and biparental nuclear (nDNA) genetic markers.