Wildlife Conservation

Professor David Macdonald

Professor David Macdonald, founder of Oxford University's WildCRU (the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit) began working on lions, in and around Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, in the late 1990s. The project has grown to involve a large team, and covered a wide array of discoveries about lion ecology and behaviour, and their relevance to wider lion conservation. David, working with his long-term colleague, Andrew Loveridge, has published widely on topics such as landscape planning (the identification of refuges for lion and corridors linking them), ways of resolving conflict between farmers and lions, and the thorny issue of lion trophy hunting. The latter leapt to international prominence with the killing, by a Minnesotan cross-bow hunter, of the projects study-lion nicknamed Cecil. The resulting global media explosion and its aftermath is probably the biggest wildlife media story in history, and David was at the eye of the storm.