Abstract
Rodent assemblages have ecological importance in ecosystem functioning and protected area management. Our study examines the patterns of assemblages of rodents across four habitat types (i.e., Miombo woodland, Acacia woodland, grasslands and farmlands) in the savanna environment. Capture-mark-recapture (CMR) methods were applied for data collection across the Chembe Bird Sanctuary (CBS) landscape. The Non-metric Multi-Dimensional Scaling (NMDS) was used for exploratory data analysis, followed by Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Tukey–Kramer’s Honestly Significant Difference (HSD) post-hoc tests. The rodent assemblages in CBS significantly differed between the non-farmlands (i.e., Miombo woodland, Acacia woodland and grasslands) and farmlands. There were: (1) zero rodent diversity in farmlands, dominated completely by a pest species, M. natalensis; and (2) different rodent assemblages in three non-farmland habitat types. We suggest that rodent assemblages should be mediated by conservation planning and multi-stakeholder collaboration beyond the protected area boundaries to contribute to a working CBS landscape positively.
Highlights
Small mammals, defined as mammalian fauna with body mass less than 200 g, such as rodents [1], play an important ecological role in shaping the structure, composition and diversity of landscapes [2].Rodents (Order: Rodentia) contribute positively to plant cover, and soil chemical and physical properties [3,4], and impact on landscapes through pollination and dispersal of seeds and fungal spores [5,6]
Most of the rodent captures were observed in the wet seasons (n = 276; 73.2%)
The rodent assemblages appear to be more clumped than in the wet seasons across habitat types, except in farmlands dominated by M. natalensis (Figure 3a)
Summary
Small mammals, defined as mammalian fauna with body mass less than 200 g, such as rodents [1], play an important ecological role in shaping the structure, composition and diversity of landscapes [2].Rodents (Order: Rodentia) contribute positively to plant cover, and soil chemical and physical properties [3,4], and impact on landscapes through pollination and dispersal of seeds and fungal spores [5,6]. The rodent assemblage may be affected by the amount of vegetation cover protecting rodents from predators, and food availability for their survival in different habitat types, including farmlands [10,11,12]. The rodent diversity would be affected by the functional spatial heterogeneity of habitats they explore and occupy [13]. Such environmental factors, such as fire, vegetation types, and season, may proffer cues to rodents to utilise, or not, a particular space in time for food and denning [14,15,16,17]. Seasons may affect the availability of dietary items, such as seeds, flowers, Diversity 2020, 12, 365; doi:10.3390/d12100365 www.mdpi.com/journal/diversity
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