IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Kshettry, A. | |
| Resource selection by the leopard (_Panthera pardus_) in a landscape mosaic in northern West Bengal | |
| 2014 Full Book | |
Long-term conservation strategies for wide ranging large carnivores need to integrate protected area networks and human-use landscapes, especially when protected areas are very small in size. In such landscapes, shared spaces between potentially dangerous wildlife species and humans could result in human-wildlife conflict. This compromises the conservation of many charismatic mega-fauna such as large bodied felids and herbivores. The leopard is one such highly adaptable large felid that ranges even in areas of high human densities. Livestock depredation is not uncommon and human attacks, although rare, do occur, but the ecology of such interactions is not well understood. Effective management and response to human-wildlife conflict requires information of its ecology from multiple-use landscapes, which is lacking today. Northern West Bengal in India is a region where leopard conflicts have been reported for more than two decades. Leopards there occur in multiple land use types ranging from forests and tea-estates to villages. In this study I investigated habitat selection and diet selection of leopards in a highly heterogeneous landscape. I also examined if resource use by the leopards in the high conflict area could explain livestock depredation and attacks on humans in the landscape. My study encompassed ~400 km2 of a multiple use landscape that consisted of both forest and rural inhabitations interspersed with tea gardens. I surveyed the entire study area for indirect signs of the leopard, its prey, and human activity in 102 resource units or sites of area 4 km2 each. Leopard scats were collected and examined to understand the patterns of prey consumption. Wild prey availability was assessed using distance sampling and domestic prey abundance was obtained from government livestock census reports. Locations of leopard attacks on humans were obtained from Forest Department records and the affected people were interviewed. The habitat selection data was analysed using an occupancy modelling framework where the covariates of used sites were compared to that of unused sites. The models included ground based and remotely sensed covariates. The predicted probability of site use was used to model leopard attacks in the landscape using generalized linear models. The diet selection was assessed in a 'used-versus-available' framework using a parametric bootstrap method. The results indicate that leopards strongly avoided sites with high density of houses and human activity. Also, they selected habitats with dense ground vegetation cover and presence of a large number of freely grazing goats. Chi-squared tests showed no overall selectivity in diet (.2= 33.49, P=0.06, SE=0.01).Rhesus macaques were predated upon more than their proportional availability (.2=28.80, P=0.01, SE=0.00) despite their low relative biomass in the scat (10%). In spite of having high percentage of domestic prey biomass in the diet (68%), there was no selectivity for cattle (.2 =0.45, P=0.77, SE=0.01) or goats (.2=4.55, P=0.31, SE=0.01); which were used in proportion to their availability. Attacks on humans were not randomly placed in space but was significantly explained by the predicted probability of site use around the location of these attacks. In this study, tea-estates were found to be leopard habitats and there is lot of overlap of leopard range with human activities here. The results of the study can be used to minimize conflict by focussing conservation and mitigation efforts in the tea estates and other similar estates in other parts of India where leopards are found. |
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