Endangered African wild dogs can still pull off astonishing journeys across southern Africa’s shifting landscape, new research shows, offering fresh proof that wildlife corridors continue to link protected areas even as human development spreads.
The study, published today in the journal Ecology, tracked 19 groups of wild dogs as they moved across thousands of kilometres of land shared with people in Zambia, with some animals reaching into — or right up to the border of — five neighbouring countries.
The standout case: three brothers who covered 4,126 kilometres in eight months, the longest dispersal ever recorded for an African mammal. Unlike the seasonal back-and-forth of migration, dispersal is a one-way trip young dogs make in search of mates and territory of their own.
That journey isn’t getting any easier. As roads, farms and towns carve up the landscape, the routes wild dogs rely on are growing thinner and more perilous. Some of the animals that traveled the farthest in the study never made it to safety — dying in wire snares set to catch bushmeat, in a few cases after covering more than 2,000 kilometres. The pattern has researchers asking a harder question: are wild dogs being forced into these marathon treks because food and habitat closer to home are running out?
Still, by mapping where dogs are succeeding in moving between protected areas, the study gives governments and conservation groups a clearer picture of exactly which corridors, pathways and buffer zones deserve scarce funding.
“I have studied wild dogs since 1991 and would not have imagined that in 2026 we would conclude that most of the critical wild dog populations in Eastern and Southern Africa probably remain connected,” said Professor Scott Creel of Montana State University, the paper’s lead author.
“Despite their invariably small population sizes and the high risk of mortality in human-dominated landscapes, wild dogs’ enduring capacity to move long distances through unfavourable landscapes provides an extraordinary opportunity to conserve a functional meta-population of an endangered large carnivore at the continental scale.”
Tracking a continent-scale trek
Researchers from the Zambian Carnivore Programme (ZCP), working alongside the Zambian Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) and partners including The Nature Conservancy (TNC), fitted the dogs with GPS collars and followed them up and down the Great Rift Valley escarpment, across rivers and highways, around cities and lakes, and straight through the industrial heart of Zambia’s Copperbelt mining region.
Fourteen dogs across four groups covered the greatest distances of all — nearly 10,000 kilometres combined, more than the round-trip distance of driving I-90 coast to coast across the United States, from Seattle to Boston and back. Measured against Africa’s most celebrated migrations, including the Serengeti’s wildebeest and zebra or the white-tailed kob and tiang of South Sudan and Ethiopia, these dogs traveled as far or farther in a single dispersal as those species cover circling their entire migratory range.
Because wild dogs range so widely, scientists treat them as a bellwether for landscape connectivity generally. Their successful journeys suggest the ecological threads linking major wildlife landscapes across east and southern Africa are still intact — good news not just for wild dogs but for the many other species, including other large carnivores, that depend on the same connections.
That connectivity faces mounting pressure. Zambia’s population has grown by roughly 50% since 2010, and the resulting spread of farms, mines, roads, settlements and degraded common land is squeezing wildlife habitat from every direction. The Zambian government has set aside nearly 40% of the country for some form of conservation, but stretched national budgets leave little funding to manage that land effectively.
Protecting the spaces between the parks
“These extraordinary journeys show that natural connections between Africa’s wildlife strongholds still exist and that maintaining continent-wide connectivity for endangered African wild dogs remains a realistic conservation goal,” said Dr Matt Becker, CEO of ZCP.
“The movements we documented show that wild dogs can still connect distant populations, but they also reveal how difficult and dangerous those journeys have become. Rather than relying solely on fenced protected areas, these findings show the value of investing in connected landscapes – supporting habitat, reducing conflict between people and wildlife, and helping communities conserve the areas between national parks that animals depend on. The dogs are showing us that connectivity still works; now we need to do more to protect and strengthen it.”
The findings back up a conservation strategy that looks beyond national parks as isolated islands, focusing instead on the community lands and corridors that stitch them together. It’s a massive undertaking — these corridors often stretch many kilometres wide and hundreds of kilometres long. The nine community Game Management Areas (GMAs) ringing Zambia’s Kafue National Park alone span more territory than Denmark, or five Yellowstone National Parks combined.
“Creating these safe spaces on the peripheries of national parks and in the buffer zones between them creates the stepping stones for these extraordinary movements,” said Bruce Ellender, one of the paper’s co-authors and Kafue Conservation Director for TNC, which works with and funds ZCP. “But half of the land in the GMAs that act as buffer zones around Kafue National Park have already been converted to agriculture, for example. If that continues unchecked, the opportunity for connectivity between ecosystems would be lost within a decade.
“This research moves us beyond saying ‘connectivity is important’ to showing which corridors and pathways are the most important. It helps government and conservation partners focus limited resources where we can have the greatest impact. It helps us take a landscape approach to conserve that wider ecological integrity, with this mosaic of complementary areas that animals need. This kind of well-designed, targeted research from the kind of expert team ZCP and DNPW gathered here is invaluable for truly effective conservation.”
In Zambia, TNC works to equip local communities with the tools and training to manage natural resources sustainably and benefit economically from them. The organisation also supports anti-poaching and desnaring efforts, works to ease conflict between people and wildlife, and helps develop long-term funding models for conservation.
That work mirrors TNC’s broader footprint across 21 African countries, including the five-nation Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Area (KAZA), where governments and conservation groups are trying to protect connectivity across 500,000 square kilometres.
“These long-term studies provide key evidence that connectivity between large landscapes is still there,” said Dr Nyambe Nyambe, Executive Director of the KAZA Secretariat. “If we conserve and continue to improve these connections – spanning the range of national parks, community areas, nations, and regions – a lot of species like wild dogs can make the rest happen.”
A species built to roam — and increasingly at risk
Taken together, the dogs ZCP has tracked have now linked all seven of Zambia’s ecosystems that support resident wild dog populations, with some animals venturing into Mozambique and Malawi and coming close to Zimbabwe, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In July, one group from South Luangwa National Park was spotted in Malawi for the first time.
African wild dogs are classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List, with an estimated 6,600 adults left across 39 scattered populations continent-wide. Among the widest-ranging of Africa’s carnivores, they live in tight-knit social packs and rely on movement between populations to stay genetically healthy over the long run. Habitat fragmentation, shrinking prey numbers, bushmeat snares, disease and conflict with people remain their biggest threats.
Young wild dogs typically leave their birth packs between two and three years old to find unrelated mates and start packs of their own. These dispersals are vital to keeping populations healthy and genetically diverse — but they’re also among the riskiest chapters of a wild dog’s life.
The study, Extraordinary movements connecting distant ecosystems by African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus), was carried out by researchers from the Zambian Carnivore Programme and the Zambia Department of National Parks and Wildlife, together with partners including TNC, Montana State University, the University of Oxford, the University of Wyoming, African Parks, Musekese Conservation and Conservation South Luangwa. It draws on years of GPS collar tracking, field monitoring and ecological research across Zambia.
