When faced with drought, how do Africa’s great predators adjust their behavior to survive? Join Leigh West, a wildlife researcher and Explorers Club grantee, as she shares how lions, leopards, cheetahs, and African wild dogs change their movements when water sources dwindle and prey becomes scarce. Discover how these predators interact with one another and share the landscape with people as they adapt to increasingly frequent and severe environmental challenges.
Through captivating stories from her fieldwork in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, Leigh will reveal how understanding predator behavior during extreme climate events can help foster coexistence between people and wildlife. Using 13 years of GPS data from these carnivores encompassing several droughts, Leigh’s research highlights how drought can reshape carnivore behavior, from shifting movement patterns to changing exposure to humans, and has direct implications for conservation in a changing climate.
Perfect for adventurers, conservationists, and anyone fascinated by the resilience of wildlife and the challenges of living alongside them!
This in-person event at the Explorers Club Headquarters will include an audience Q&A.
Streaming live here on explorers.org, our YouTube Channel, and our Facebook Live — Monday, March 24th at 7:00 pm ET.
RESERVATIONS
This will be an in-person lecture at Explorers Club Headquarters.
In-person tickets are $20 for Members, and $35 for the General Public.
Check-in will begin at 6:00 pm, with a beer and wine reception from 6:00 – 7:00 pm
Leigh West
Leigh West is a field ecologist and PhD candidate in the Abrahms Lab at the University of Washington’s Center for Ecosystem Sentinels. She is also an affiliate researcher with Wild Entrust. Her research explores how large carnivores adapt to environmental extremes, with a focus on drought. Supported by an Explorers Club Expedition Grant, her PhD focuses on how predators move, interact with one another, and navigate living alongside people in resource-scarce landscapes.
With extensive field experience across four continents, Leigh has studied everything from marine invertebrates and seabirds in Antarctica, to primates and predators in Africa, to cetaceans in New York City’s urban waters. She holds a BA in Environmental Biology from Columbia University and a Master’s in Science Communication from Imperial College London, where she wrote her dissertation on the portrayal of traditional ecological knowledge in the television program The Wild Thornberrys. When not in the field, Leigh enjoys cooking, live music, and hiking with her dogs.
