- Well, lions, are obviously one of the world's best known species.

They're the top predator in Africa.

Well, aside from humans, of course.

- [Narrator] Dr.

Peter Lindsey is the director of the Lion Recovery Fund an initiative of the Wildlife Conservation Network that supports conservation efforts to protect dwindling lion populations by addressing illegal wildlife trade, promoting human/lion coexistance, and funding under-resourced wildlife areas.

-[Lindsey] So lions are under pressure from three different types of threats principally.

So threats that affect the habitat or habitat loss, threats that result in loss of their prey, and then threats that cause the death of lions themselves.

It's possible to co-exist with lions comfortably, but it's not automatic.

It's hard to reduce livestock depredation to zero.

So it's good to have strategies in place that really create incentives for people to live with lions.

- [Narrator] Strategies include livestock from lion attacks by improving herding and reinforcing livestock enclosures as well as warning people when lions are too close to their villages.

- [Lindsey] Well, I think one thing that's not very well understood is that they're struggling.

You know, in terms of their population.

So, you know, it took even the conservation community in Africa didn't really kind of clock that they were struggling until about 2006 or so.

When you go to the well known parks there's lots of them and you see them fairly easily.

So I think people were lulled into a false sense of security.

So between the release of the first Lion King movie, and the second Lion King movie, lion numbers in Africa in the wild declined by about half during that period.

So the purpose of the Lion Recovery Fund, our aspirational target is to double the number of lions by 2050, which is essentially to get the lions back that we lost in the time period between those two movies.

- [Narrator] To learn more about how we can preserve the future of lions visit norcalpublicmedia.org/wildlife