Run by the Kalahari Research Trust and directed by Marta Manser with Tim Clutton-Brock as co-director, the KRC is a well-established leading research site in Southern Africa. With its long-standing history and continuous long-term data across several projects, the KRC supports research testing challenging and diverse hypotheses. Research programs focus on subjects within evolutionary biology, animal behavior, behavioral ecology, population demography, eco-physiology, epidemiology, and population genetics across several species.
The Kalahari Meerkat Project (KMP) is the largest and longest (ca. 1993) running project at the KRC, addressing almost any topic on animal social living.
Projects on cooperation in the underground living Damaraland mole-rats have been going on since 2013 in both captive and wild groups.
Behavioural ecology, particularly vocal communication and cognition, in the socially flexible yellow mongoose has been studied since 2021.
The study on the herbivorous social Cape ground squirrel provides a unique comparison to the mongoose species in the same habitat since 2011.
A unique and distinguishing aspect of much of the research at the KRC is the capability to study at both an individual and population level across species. There are few limits to what can be studied, and several territories or home ranges of a single species can be found within or overlapping the study site. Many animal species are habituated to close human presence. There is great respect and understanding among researchers for other study species, and this can benefit habituation greatly. There is the capability of studying natural interspecies interactions of co-existing species, expanding detailed investigations to the community level.