Responses of snow leopards, wolves and wild ungulates to livestock grazing in the Zorkul Strictly Protected Area, Tajikistan.

Abstract

Long recognized as a threat to wildlife, livestock grazing in protected areas has the potential to undermine conservation goals, via competition, habitat degradation, human-carnivore conflict and disruption of predator-prey relationships. In the Strictly Protected Area Zorkul in Tajikistan (Zorkul Reserve), grazing is commonplace despite official prohibition, with potentially detrimental effects on local fauna, in particular, snow leopard Panthera uncia, wolf Canis lupus, brown bear Ursus arctos, argali sheep Ovis ammon, Asiatic ibex Capra sibirica, and long-tailed marmot Marmota caudata. To understand the impacts of grazing and associated human pastoralism on the large mammal community in Zorkul Reserve we used data from camera traps to build models of ungulate and carnivore site use intensity, and we investigated carnivore summer diets using microscopic scat analysis. While sample sizes limited our inference for several species, we found that site use of the most common ungulate, argali, decreased with proximity to herder’s camps, indicating possible displacement into sub-optimal habitats. However, no such pattern was present in carnivore site use. For wolf and snow leopard, the most frequently encountered prey items were argali and marmot, while bear depended almost exclusively on marmot. While current pastoralist practices in the reserve may not be incompatible with wildlife presence, our findings suggest that pastoralism may negatively impact ungulates by displacing them from otherwise suitable habitats, with unknown fitness consequences for ungulates or the predators that depend upon them. Managing Zorkul Reserve and other actively grazed protected areas to meet potentially competing demands of local pastoralist communities and conservation will require careful consideration of such interactions to minimize the risk of cascading negative impacts on wildlife.