The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has an objective to commit to conserving some of the most important landscapes around the World that contain at least 25% of the World’s biodiversity. In many landscapes it is the large bodied species that are keystone herbivores or predators that are most threatened by human impacts because much of their activities occur at the same scale as people and because they tend to occur at low density and need large areas of land to maintain viable populations. WCS is well known around the world for using science to better understand the needs of these landscape species and to then apply this understanding to ensure the conservation of these species.
Uganda is one of the most biodiverse countries in Africa and is also rich in the numbers of these landscape species.We have programs that focus on many different species as a result and in particular have studied and conserved:
1. Lions and other large carnivores
2. Elephants
3. Mountain gorillas
4. Chimpanzees
5. Vultures
6. Crocodiles
7.The rich biodiversity of endemic and threatened species of the Albertine Rift in particular
Our focus in Uganda is to better understand the ecological needs of these species, what is causing their populations to decline where they are and to then work with local people and the Uganda government to develop solutions to halt the decline and rebuild populations again. Uganda is a country that has gone through terrible civil wars which led to the decimation of its wildlife in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However,it is also a country that can encourage other nations in Africa in that its wildlife populations are recovering and in some sites reaching their pre-war numbers. It is a place that gives hope that these landscape can recover if protected even after terrible losses of wildlife.