Abstract
Context
Habitat loss limits the dispersal of wide-ranging large mammals. It is pivotal to study the ecological and anthropogenic factors driving the habitat occupancy of large mammals for their long-term conservation and reduction of negative human–wildlife interactions.
Objective
To evaluate how the habitat occupancy pattern of the large mammals varies across a gradient of anthropogenic pressures.
Methods
We conducted ecological sign surveys across nine forest divisions including, Protected Areas (PAs) and outside PAs, along the Western and Eastern Ghats of Tamil Nadu, India. We used systematic grid-based Markovian occupancy model to study the effect of ecological and anthropogenic variables (prey abundance, habitat features, direct human disturbance and habitat fragmentation) on tiger (Panthera tigris), leopard (Panthera pardus), dhole (Cuon alpinus), elephant (Elephas maximus) and gaur (Bos gaurus) occupancy at 100 km2 scale.
Results
Tiger and dhole occupancy was driven by the abundance of large and medium-sized prey. However, leopards also relied on the available small prey species and utilised fragmented forest patches. Large mammal occupancy increased in contiguous forests with water availability and decreased in landscapes with increased human disturbances and habitat fragmentation. Tiger occupancy was highly confined towards contiguous PA network while the rest of them had scattered but concentrated occupancy towards PAs.
Conclusions
The dependency of large mammals on contiguous forests suggests improving the quality and connectivity of forested habitats for their dispersal and reducing negative human–wildlife interactions. The low occupancy areas require urgent habitat management intervention to reduce grazing pressure and restore degraded habitats to sustain viable large mammal population at landscape-level.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to The Director, Sálim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON) for providing us with logistic support. We acknowledge the Chief Wildlife Warden, Tamil Nadu for granting us permission to carry out fieldwork across various forest divisions in Tamil Nadu. We are highly indebted to the Tamil Nadu Forest Department staff of all nine forest divisions and Project Interns for their support during our fieldwork. We are thankful to Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), a statutory body of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India for funding our project under the Ramanujan Fellowship scheme (Grant No. SB/S2/RJN049/2016) and the Core Research Grant (Grant No. EMR/2017/001849) to the third author.
Funding
This work was supported by Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), a statutory body of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, under the Ramanujan Fellowship scheme (Grant No. SB/S2/RJN049/2016) and the Core Research Grant (Grant No. EMR/2017/001849) to the third author.
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DM and TR conceived the ideas; DM, MT, and KA collected the data; DM, TR and RK, analysed the data; DM led the writing; TR, RK and KA provided editorial input.
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Milda, D., Ashish, K., Ramesh, T. et al. Evaluation of anthropogenic pressure on the occupancy patterns of large mammals in the Western and Eastern Ghats. Landsc Ecol 38, 409–422 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-022-01592-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-022-01592-9