IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Soyumert, A.; ErtĀrk, A.; Tavsanoglu, C. | |
| The importance of lagomorphs for the Eurasian lynx in Western Asia: Results from a large scale camera-trapping survey in Turkey | |
| 2019 Mammalian Biology (95): 18-25 | |
Explaining predator-prey relationship is crucial for implementing effective conservation practices onlarge mammals. The Eurasian lynx (_Lynx lynx_) preys on small ungulates such as roe deer (_Capreolus capreolus_) in Europe, and on hares (_Lepus_ spp.) in more eastern longitudes, but there is lack of informationon the southernmost populations of the Eurasian lynx in Turkey.This study explores the spatial and temporal relationship of the Eurasian lynx with its two mainpreys, roe deer and the brown hare (_Lepus europaeus_) in north-western Anatolia using long-term camera-trapping data. Camera-trapping surveys were held with 173 systematic camera-trap stations at 10 studysites between November 2007 and July 2016, and reached to 53,995 trap-nights in total. To analyse thecamera-trap data, we used a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) assuming binomial error distribu-tion for presence/absence data and general linear mixed model (LMM) for the relative abundance data. Inboth modelling approaches, we considered the study site as the random factor. We estimated the overlapof daily activity patterns of Eurasian lynx with roe deer and brown hare using kernel density estimation.Both GLMM and LMM analyses indicated a significant spatial relationship between the Eurasian lynxand the brown hare ( c2= 22.4, P < 0.0001 and Likelihood ratio = 4.8, P < 0.05, respectively), but not betweenthe Eurasian lynx and roe deer (P > 0.05). The daily activity of Eurasian lynx highly overlapped withbrown hare (D4= 0.81), but we found a lower overlap between Eurasian lynx and roe deer (D4= 0.62).The findings reveal that the presence of Eurasian lynx is temporally and spatially synchronized with thebrown hare in northern Anatolia, and support that the brown hare, but not the roe deer, constitutes themain diet of Eurasian lynx in the study area |
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