Cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus), the fastest land mammals on Earth, are struggling to outrun habitat loss, fragmentation, and climate change.

The cats currently occupy less than 10% of their historic range across Africa and West Asia. Across five living subspecies, only about 7,100 individuals remain in the wild.

But all subspecies of cheetah are threatened. Across Africa and in Iran, many organizations are finding new ways to help save this unique wild cat.

In South Africa, for example, conservationists are exploring the metapopulation approach to cheetah conservation. While, in untouched wilderness, cheetahs would roam far and wide, creating large, distant webs of connection when they breed with one another, roads and fences limit this natural movement. So conservationists at wildlife reserves like Kuzuko have taken over this task for them, spreading cheetahs to different reserves in South Africa and surrounding countries.

The Cheetah Metapopulation Project and similar initiatives don’t just help cheetahs; when they’re introduced to a new area, it results in an uptick of vultures and other scavengers, who feast on the cheetahs’ leftovers. Steady predation is also necessary to maintain plant populations.

Another successful conservation method is the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF)’s Livestock Guarding Dog Program. In Namibia, CCF gives trained guard dogs to local farmers, which alert livestock to the presence of cheetahs and scare the cats away.

The goal of the Livestock Guarding Dog (LGD) program is to reduce human-wildlife conflict. In poor, rural areas, large predators like cheetahs are often killed in retaliation for hunting livestock. But LDGs scare cheetahs away, so farmers have no reason to kill them.

According to CCF, fa

rmers report an 80 to 100% reduction in livestock kills by cheetahs and other predators.

The hard work and innovation of conservationists across the cheetah’s range help keep this exceptional predator alive.