Every five minutes, a quiet ping travels from the collar around lioness Sasa's neck, logging her exact position somewhere in Tanzania's vast Serengeti. That steady rhythm—twelve data points every hour, 288 per day—is a quantum leap beyond the old way of tracking lions, which typically captured a location just once per hour. Sasa is the first feline pioneer of a new GPS collar system developed by researchers from Leiden University in partnership with the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute and Smart Parks, a technology company dedicated to protecting endangered species.
The innovation lies not just in frequency but in efficiency. The collar stores data locally and transmits it through an energy-efficient network rather than relying on satellites, making the system significantly cheaper to operate and far less demanding on batteries. "Because the system uses less energy, we can not only collect data for longer, but also track more animals within the same budget," said ecologist Michiel Veldhuis. That means more comprehensive movement maps without the constant need to dart lions out of the wild for battery replacements.
The research team—ecologists Matana Ng'Weli, Emily Strange, and Michiel Veldhuis—isn't tracking Sasa simply to chart her wanderings. They're working to understand a tension that grows more acute by the year: humans and lions increasingly occupy the same spaces. When pastoralists' livestock stray into lion territory, or when lions venture too close to human settlements, conflict often follows—and sometimes retaliatory killings of predators. If researchers can map precisely where and when these encounters happen, they can begin to design solutions.
"If we understand which areas lions avoid or prefer, we can design landscapes in ways that make conflicts less likely," Ng'Weli explained. This might mean making certain high-risk zones less attractive to lions while protecting the corridors they rely on for migration. The detailed, continuous data from the new collar system makes patterns visible that hourly snapshots could never reveal—seasonal shifts, daily routes, the subtle geography of a lion's world.
Sasa's collar is currently a pilot, a deliberate first step. "This pilot is designed to help us improve the collars before scaling it up further—maximizing data quality while minimizing battery use," said Veldhuis. For Strange, the vision extends further: "Ultimately, we want to expand this approach to more lions in regions where human and wildlife activity overlap. This will help us make better-informed decisions for both safety and conservation."
In a landscape where the line between human and wild grows thinner by the decade, these researchers are betting that better data can build a buffer—not just for lions like Sasa, but for the communities who share their world.