White-Rumped Vulture’s Distribution in Relation to the Landscape Factors in Arunachal Pradesh, India

Abstract

Avian distribution over the globe is normally influenced by many environmental factors including landscape factors. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the influence of landscape factors like elevation, vegetation, and land covers on occurrence of White-rumped Vultures in Arunachal Pradesh. The occurrence and abundance data were obtained following road count and point count methods from 2016 to 2020. The digital elevation model and normalized difference vegetation index data were obtained from the USGS database. The land-use land-cover data was obtained from the ESRI database. To evaluate the correlation between the WRV distribution and prevailing landscape factors spearman ranked correlation was used. Our correlation analysis showed highly negative correlation between elevation and WRV distribution (rs = -0.77, n=53, p <0.0001), moderately negative correlation between NDVI11 and WRV distribution (rs = -0.57, n=53, p <0.0001), moderately negative correlation between NDVI02 and WRV (rs = -0.56, n=53, p <0.0001), and moderately negative correlation between NDVI06 and WRV distribution (rs = -0.62, n=53, p <0.0001). In case of land-use land-covers, WRV was found most abundant in shrubs/ scrubs followed by croplands, barren areas, areas with trees, built areas, grasslands, and areas with waterbody. According to the present study, WRVs prefer habitats with lower elevation, lower NDVI values, and open areas with scattered vegetation, particularly trees. These findings provide more insight into the habitat requirements of WRV, which is significant information for conservation of WRV.