Abstract
BackgroundLarge carnivores maintain the stability and functioning of ecosystems. Currently, many carnivore species face declining population sizes due to natural and anthropogenic pressures. The leopard, Panthera pardus, is probably the most widely distributed and highly adaptable large felid globally, still persisting in most of its historic range. However, we lack subspecies-level data on country or regional scale on population trends, as ecological monitoring approaches are difficult to apply on such wide-ranging species. We used genetic data from leopards sampled across the Indian subcontinent to investigate population structure and patterns of demographic decline.MethodsWe collected faecal samples from the Terai-Arc landscape of northern India and identified 56 unique individuals using a panel of 13 microsatellite markers. We merged this data with already available 143 leopard individuals and assessed genetic structure at country scale. Subsequently, we investigated the demographic history of each identified subpopulations and compared genetic decline analyses with countrywide local extinction probabilities.ResultsOur genetic analyses revealed four distinct subpopulations corresponding to Western Ghats, Deccan Plateau-Semi Arid, Shivalik and Terai region of the north Indian landscape, each with high genetic variation. Coalescent simulations with microsatellite loci revealed a possibly human-induced 75–90% population decline between ∼120–200 years ago across India. Population-specific estimates of genetic decline are in concordance with ecological estimates of local extinction probabilities in these subpopulations obtained from occupancy modeling of the historic and current distribution of leopards in India.ConclusionsOur results confirm the population decline of a widely distributed, adaptable large carnivore. We re-iterate the relevance of indirect genetic methods for such species in conjunction with occupancy assessment and recommend that detailed, landscape-level ecological studies on leopard populations are critical to future conservation efforts. Our approaches and inference are relevant to other widely distributed, seemingly unaffected carnivores such as the leopard.
Highlights
Large carnivores are critical to ecosystem structure and functioning (Sergio et al 2008) and their absence can lead to significant changes in trophic cascades (Terborgh et al 2001, Steneck 2005, Estes et al 2011, Ripple et al 2014)
We investigated (1) extent of genetic variation in leopard that persists across the Indian subcontinent; (2) population structure of leopards at country scale; (3) the demographic history of leopards by assessing recent changes in population size and (4) compared the finding of genetic decline analyses with country wide ecological extinction probabilities
Individual identification of leopards from north Indian landscape Of the 778 large carnivore faecal samples collected from Terai-Arc landscape (TAL), we identified 195 faeces to be of leopard origin (25%) using species-specific PCR assays (Mondol et al 2014; Maroju et al 2016)
Summary
Large carnivores are critical to ecosystem structure and functioning (Sergio et al 2008) and their absence can lead to significant changes in trophic cascades (Terborgh et al 2001, Steneck 2005, Estes et al 2011, Ripple et al 2014). The historical range of leopards spanned across nearly 35,000,000 km area covering all of sub-Saharan and North Africa, the Middle East and Asia Minor, South and Southeast Asia, and the Russian Far East (Uphyrkina et al 2001, Jacobson et al 2016) Their current distribution and numbers have significantly decreased across the range due to habitat loss, prey depletion, conflict and poaching over the last century (Shepherd 2001, Banks & Newman 2004, Jacobson et al 2016). We investigated (1) extent of genetic variation in leopard that persists across the Indian subcontinent; (2) population structure of leopards at country scale; (3) the demographic history of leopards by assessing recent changes in population size and (4) compared the finding of genetic decline analyses with country wide ecological extinction probabilities. We addressed these questions using genetic data generated using 13 polymorphic microsatellite loci from leopard faecal samples collected across different landscapes of India
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