This archive of reports of wildlife surveys in Namibia aims to:
Public access to information is a vital component of ensuring community engagement in prevalent issues. Wildlife surveys are critical to determine the health of wildlife populations and determine trends over time to guide conservation and management actions.
Wildlife surveys are done for different species using methods that are suited to counting them (e.g. by air or road) in their natural habitats. Such surveys need to be repeated over time to detect long-term trends and inform conservation managers. The Namibian government, non-governmental organisations and private reserves all conduct regular surveys covering different parts of Namibia and targeting different species. This archive will thus serve as a repository of our collective knowledge of the trends and status of a variety of species occurring throughout Namibia.
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Knowledge of a population’s abundance is of primary importance for conservation management. However, robust estimates of abundance are often difficult to obtain, especially for cetaceans which spend most of their lives submerged. Cetacean abundance is commonly estimated using aerial or vessel-based line transect surveys and distance sampling methods. During 2012–2014, the first line transect surveys to estimate cetacean abundance were conducted in Namibian waters.
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First Abundance Estimates of Heavisides and Dusky Dolphin off Namibia.pdf | 5.23 MB |
Knowledge of the occurrence and distribution of cetaceans is particularly important for conservation and management, but is still limited within Namibian waters. We collated 3211 cetacean records from the Namibian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) for the period 2008 to 2016 and applied the principle of minimum cross entropy (MinxEnt) to predict habitat suitability. MinxEnt is a generalised form of maximum entropy modelling that allows incorporation of additional information such as sampling bias.
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Predicting large_scale habitat suitability for cetaceans off Namibia using MinxEnt.pdf | 2.91 MB |
Assessing the numbers and distribution of threatened species is a central challenge in conservation, often made difficult because the species of concern are rare and elusive. For some predators, this may be compounded by their being sparsely distributed over large areas. Such is the case with the cheetah Acinonyx jubatus. The IUCN Red List process solicits comments, is democratic, transparent, widely-used, and has recently assessed the species.
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The distribution and numbers of cheetah in southern Africa_2017.pdf | 6.63 MB |
In 2011, the Ministry of Environment and Tourism conducted a questionnaire to various stakeholders to determine relative abundance of large carnivores throughout Namibia. The results of this questionnaire were quantified and mapped to establish the current range and relative abundance of the six Namibian large carnivores. Recent population estimates for leopards are used here, however, the remaining species we used estimates from the previous Atlas as our best estimates to date.
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Namibia Large Carnivore Atlas_2012.pdf | 3.87 MB |
Leopards are the most widely-distributed wild cat on earth. They are found throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa and in smaller populations within the Middle East, southwest Asia, southeast Asia and north to the Amur peninsula of the Russian Far-East. Throughout this distribution, leopards have persisted in hostile areas outside of protected areas due to their secretive nature and adaptable ability to live in a variety of habitats including sub-urban environments.
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Namibian National Leopard Survey_2011.pdf | 565.33 KB |