Rather Tahir Ali, Kumar Sharad, Khan Jamal Ahmad
Department of Wildlife Sciences, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India.
The Corbett Foundation, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.
PeerJ. 2021 Feb 17;9:e10634. doi: 10.7717/peerj.10634. eCollection 2021.
The conservation of large carnivores often requires precise and accurate estimates of their populations. Being cryptic and occurring at low population densities, obtaining an unbiased population estimate is difficult in large carnivores. To overcome the uncertainties in the conventional capture-recapture (CR) methods used to estimate large carnivore densities, more robust methods such as spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) framework are now widely used. We modeled the CR data of tiger () and leopard () in the SECR framework with biotic and abiotic covariates likely believed to influence their densities. An effort of 2,211 trap nights resulted in the capture of 33 and 38 individual tigers and leopards. A total of 95 and 74 detections of tigers and leopards were achieved using 35 pairs of camera traps. Tiger and leopard density were estimated at 4.71 ± 1.20 (3.05-5.11) and 3.03 ± 0.78 (1.85-4.99) per 100 km. Our results show that leopard density increased with high road density, high terrain ruggedness and habitats with high percentage of cropland and natural vegetation. The tiger density was positively influenced by the mosaic of cropland and natural vegetation. This study provides the first robust density estimates of tiger and leopard within the study area. Our results support the notion that large carnivores can attain moderate densities within human-dominated regions around protected areas relying on domestic livestock. Broader management strategies aimed at maintaining wild prey in the human-dominated areas around protected areas are necessary for large and endangered carnivores' sustenance in the buffer zones around protected areas.
大型食肉动物的保护通常需要对其种群数量进行精确且准确的估计。由于大型食肉动物行踪隐秘且种群密度较低，要获得无偏差的种群估计很困难。为克服用于估计大型食肉动物密度的传统标记重捕法（CR）的不确定性，现在广泛使用更稳健的方法，如空间明确的标记重捕法（SECR）框架。我们在SECR框架下，用可能被认为会影响老虎（）和豹（）密度的生物和非生物协变量对其CR数据进行建模。2211个诱捕夜的努力捕获了33只和38只老虎和豹个体。使用35对相机陷阱分别对老虎和豹进行了95次和74次检测。老虎和豹的密度估计分别为每100平方公里4.71±1.20（3.05 - 5.11）只和3.03±0.78（1.85 - 4.99）只。我们的结果表明，豹的密度随着高道路密度、高地形崎岖度以及农田和自然植被比例高的栖息地而增加。老虎的密度受到农田和自然植被镶嵌体的正向影响。本研究提供了研究区域内老虎和豹的首个可靠密度估计。我们的结果支持这样一种观点，即大型食肉动物在依赖家畜的保护区周边人类主导区域内能够达到适度的密度。对于大型濒危食肉动物在保护区周边缓冲区的生存而言，旨在维持人类主导区域内野生猎物数量的更广泛管理策略是必要的。
