Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore, Karnataka, India.
Manipal University, Manipal, Karnataka, India.
PLoS One. 2021 May 19;16(5):e0250900. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0250900. eCollection 2021.
The endangered snow leopard Panthera uncia occurs in human use landscapes in the mountains of South and Central Asia. Conservationists generally agree that snow leopards must be conserved through a land-sharing approach, rather than land-sparing in the form of strictly protected areas. Effective conservation through land-sharing requires a good understanding of how snow leopards respond to human use of the landscape. Snow leopard density is expected to show spatial variation within a landscape because of variation in the intensity of human use and the quality of habitat. However, snow leopards have been difficult to enumerate and monitor. Variation in the density of snow leopards remains undocumented, and the impact of human use on their populations is poorly understood. We examined spatial variation in snow leopard density in Spiti Valley, an important snow leopard landscape in India, via spatially explicit capture-recapture analysis of camera trap data. We camera trapped an area encompassing a minimum convex polygon of 953 km2. Our best model estimated an overall density of 0.5 (95% CI: 0.31-0.82) mature snow leopards per 100 km2. Using AIC, our best model showed the density of snow leopards to depend on estimated wild prey density, movement about activity centres to depend on altitude, and the expected number of encounters at the activity centre to depend on topography. Models that also used livestock biomass as a density covariate ranked second, but the effect of livestock was weak. Our results highlight the importance of maintaining high density pockets of wild prey populations in multiple-use landscapes to enhance snow leopard conservation.
濒危物种雪豹 Panthera uncia 分布于亚洲南部和中部山区人类活动的景观中。自然资源保护主义者普遍认为，必须通过土地共享的方式来保护雪豹，而不是通过严格保护的形式来保护土地。通过土地共享实现有效的保护需要很好地了解雪豹对景观中人类使用的反应。由于人类使用的强度和栖息地质量的变化，雪豹的密度预计会在景观内呈现出空间变化。然而，雪豹的数量很难被统计和监测。雪豹密度的变化仍然没有记录，人类使用对其种群的影响也知之甚少。我们通过对相机陷阱数据进行空间显式捕获-再捕获分析，研究了印度重要的雪豹景观——斯皮提山谷中雪豹密度的空间变化。我们用相机在一个最小凸多边形面积为 953 平方公里的区域进行了诱捕。我们的最佳模型估计，每 100 平方公里有 0.5 只（95%置信区间：0.31-0.82）成熟雪豹。根据 AIC，我们的最佳模型表明，雪豹的密度取决于估计的野生猎物密度，在活动中心周围的移动取决于海拔，以及在活动中心的预期遭遇次数取决于地形。同样使用牲畜生物量作为密度协变量的模型排名第二，但牲畜的影响较弱。我们的研究结果强调了在多用途景观中维持高密度野生猎物种群的重要性，以加强雪豹保护。
