Collaborative African lion research programme
A jointly led programme across contrasting African lion populations.
We investigate how ecological conditions shape lion social behaviour, collective action, communication, and perception by comparing populations that experience very different ecological and social environments.
Natalia Borrego & Genevieve E. Finerty
Funding & programme development
Each award expanded the same collaborative programme: first establishing a comparative framework for lion sociality, then adding whole-group approaches to collective action, and finally extending the programme toward the sensory information available before animals act.
2021 · Collaborative Research Grant
MPI-AB / University of Konstanz
Established the multi-population comparative foundation linking ecological variation to social structure, cooperation, and movement.
Added: comparative field systems and a framework for asking when different social strategies become more or less advantageous.
Official award announcement →2022 · CASCB Newcomer Project
Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour
Extended the programme from the ecology of sociality to the organization of collective action among known individuals.
Added: whole-group multi-sensor biologging and fine-scale measurement of collective movement, communication, and cooperative hunting.
Official CASCB project page →2025 · ZENiT Fellowship
Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz
Extends the programme from observed collective behaviour to the perceptual environment that precedes communication and coordination.
Added: sensory experiments, AI-supported multi-sensor analysis, and a mechanistic layer linking information, perception, and social decisions.
Official ZENiT award page →People & collaborations
The programme is jointly led by Natalia Borrego and Genevieve E. Finerty. Specific grants bring additional scientific collaborators into the programme, while long-term field partnerships make the comparative research possible.
Co-Principal Investigator
Behavioural and wildlife ecologist working on social strategies, collective behaviour, cognition, sensory ecology, and comparative field research in African lions.
Co-Principal Investigator
Ecologist working at the interface of spatial and behavioural ecology, with interests in animal movement, social and spatial structure, and collaborative quantitative research.
Comparative design
The programme uses ecological variation across populations as a natural comparative framework for asking how lion social behaviour changes when the opportunities, costs, and constraints of social living differ. The populations retain the same basic social architecture while varying strongly in resource availability, population density, landscape structure, and human overlap.
The comparison is not intended to reduce each population to a single category. Instead, these broad ecological contrasts provide a common framework for asking which features of lion social behaviour remain stable and which change with context.
Shared research infrastructure
The programme combines remote-sensing approaches across field systems with site-specific sources of behavioural and ecological knowledge. The goal is not simply to collect more data, but to make social interactions comparable across populations.
GPS, accelerometry, magnetometry, and synchronized deployments allow interactions among known pride members to be reconstructed rather than treating individuals as isolated tracks.
Direct observation, spoor reconstruction, field notes, and known-individual histories provide the behavioural evidence needed to interpret sensor records.
Acoustic records and controlled sensory experiments connect movement and collective behaviour to the information available before animals act.
Comparable data structures and analytical frameworks allow the same behavioural processes to be tested across populations instead of treating each site as an isolated case study.
Selected programme outputs
Selected papers developing the programme's comparative, methodological, and sensory perspectives.
Addressing ecological and systemic biases in behavioural research through horizontal comparison.
Read publication →Indigenous tracking explores complex lion behaviour in challenging environments.
Read publication →Integrative approaches to studying carnivores in low-density ecosystems.
Read publication →A framework for understanding how groups acquire and use sensory information.
Read publication →