Effectiveness and Applications of Hair Traps for the Study of Wild mammal populations

Abstract

ABSTRACT Direct studies of wild mammals are challenging due to the difficulty for capturing and handling and the associated high costs. Thus, noninvasive hair trapping for surveying mammal populations has been widely used in wildlife ecology and management. However, the efficiency of this method may differ depending on the animal species and other different factors. Here we aimed at evaluating the potential of hair tube traps for reliable detecting mammal species as well as to assess whether type of habitat, baits, hair trap´s size variables (length, diameter and time staying active) and position variables (height, altitude, orientation and location) influenced trapping success (i.e. obtaining hair samples or not) and effectiveness (i.e. percentage of successful sampling traps and the number of species detected) of hair traps. Hair traps were done with PVC tubes with adhesive tape inside, and they were placed at different locations where mammal cues were previously detected. Collected hairs were identifie...