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Temporal shifts as elusive responses to anthropogenic stressors in a mammal community

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Abstract

Conservation decision-making often relies on species’ distribution changes in response to anthropogenic disturbances but overlook their temporal responses. Filling the knowledge gap on the temporal shifts as elusive responses of wild animals to human activity is important because this may provide information for more proactive conservation planning. In this study, we used camera traps in a field survey technique to investigate the trade-offs between spatial and temporal responses of a mammal community to major human activities in Qinling Mountains, China. We focused on five most abundant mammalian species including giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), takin (Budorcas taxicolor), wild boar (Sus scrofa), tufted deer (Elaphodus cephalophus), and Chinese goral (Naemorhedus griseus), and examined the drivers of, and the trade-offs between the change of their spatial distributions and daily activity patterns in response to anthropogenic disturbances. We found that in response to human interferences, giant panda and takin mainly changed their distributions, while wild boar, tufted deer and Chinese goral altered their daily activity patterns, indicating the elusive responses of the latter species under anthropogenic stressors. In addition, anthropogenic stressors such as farming and tourism have more profound impacts on mammal communities than previously revealed by species distribution modeling only. For nature reserves that aim to conserve multiple species simultaneously, a more flexible, adaptive management framework is thus needed to capture the trade-offs between multiple species’ spatial and temporal responses to anthropogenic disturbance.

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The authors have listed valid sources of all environmental data, and species data is available upon request.

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Funding

The project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31971537).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Biodiversity Science and Ecological Engineering, Coastal Ecosystems Research Station of the Yangtze River Estuary,, Institute of Biodiversity Science, School of Life Sciences, Fudan University, No.2005 Songhu Rd, Shanghai, 200438, China

    Yixin Diao, Yue Weng, Bojian Gu & Fang Wang

  2. School of Natural Resources, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, 65211, USA

    Qing Zhao

Authors
  1. Yixin Diao
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  2. Qing Zhao
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  3. Yue Weng
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  4. Bojian Gu
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  5. Fang Wang
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Contributions

Conceptualization: FW, YD; methodology: FW, YD, QZ; formal analysis and investigation: YD, QZ, YW, BG, FW; writing—original draft preparation: YD, FW, QZ; writing—review and editing: YD, FW, QZ; funding acquisition: FW; resources: FW.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fang Wang.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Not applicable. This manuscript is a non-invasive wildlife study that do not require ethical approval.

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Not applicable. This manuscript is a wildlife study that do not involve human participate.

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Written informed consent for publication was obtained from all participants. All authors consent to the publication of this manuscript in the journal of Biodiversity and Conservation.

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Communicated by Clinton Jenkins.

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Appendix

Appendix

(See Tables 3, 4).

Table 3 Relationship between occurrence probability and all covariates
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Table 4 Observed overlap of wild animal in in the two categories: close to and distant to anthropogenic disturbances
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Diao, Y., Zhao, Q., Weng, Y. et al. Temporal shifts as elusive responses to anthropogenic stressors in a mammal community. Biodivers Conserv 30, 2529–2544 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-021-02208-5

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