IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Kalle, R.; Ramesh, T.; Sankar, K.; Qureshi, Q. | |
| Habitat occupancy of small felids, viverrids and herpestids in Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, Tamil Nadu | |
| 2010 Conference Proceeding | |
Small carnivores represent some of the most threatened species, but also the least known because of their rarity, elusiveness and cryptic habits. Conservation efforts commonly use habitat models as a surrogate of empirical data on monitoring the status of multi-species when documenting species occurrence as well as to predict the efficacy of management interventions. Occupancy surveys offer a potentially efficient and robust means of assessing elusive carnivore populations. We evaluated the influence of habitat models on site occupancy rates of small felids, viverrids and herpestids using presence/absence data in a capture-recapture framework from systematically placed remote camera traps (1.25 km x 1.25 km grids) in Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, Tamil Nadu over a period of 6 months from November 2009 to April 2010. We identified 64 sites covering three different habitat types (dry thorn forest, deciduous forest and semi-evergreen forest) which were repeatedly surveyed for 30 days in the dry season amounting to 1920 trap nights. The habitat models increased site occupancy rates of certain small carnivores. The dry thorn forest influenced site occupancy rate of jungle cat (_psi_ = 0.19 ñ 0.06 SE), small Indian civet (_psi_ = 0.26 ñ 0.09 SE), ruddy mongoose (_psi_ = 0.14 ñ 0.06 SE) and grey mongoose (_psi_ = 0.13 ñ 0.07 SE) while the semi-evergreen forest increased site occupancy of brown palm civet (_psi_ = 0.33 ñ 0.27 SE). The study revealed that habitat type contributed to the distribution of small carnivores indicating species-habitat relationships. Occupancy estimates from this study provide a benchmark for long-term monitoring of small carnivore populations in the future. |
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