Abstract
Wildlife conservation in human-dominated landscapes requires that we understand how animals, when making habitat-use decisions, obtain diverse and dynamically occurring resources while avoiding risks, induced by both natural predators and anthropogenic threats. Little is known about the underlying processes that enable wild animals to persist in densely populated human-dominated landscapes, particularly in developing countries. In a complex, semi-arid, fragmented, human-dominated agricultural landscape, we analyzed the habitat-use of blackbuck, a large herbivore endemic to the Indian sub-continent. We hypothesized that blackbuck would show flexible habitat-use behaviour and be risk averse when resource quality in the landscape is high, and less sensitive to risk otherwise. Overall, blackbuck appeared to be strongly influenced by human activity and they offset risks by using small protected patches (~3 km2) when they could afford to do so. Blackbuck habitat use varied dynamically corresponding with seasonally-changing levels of resources and risks, with protected habitats registering maximum use. The findings show that human activities can strongly influence and perhaps limit ungulate habitat-use and behaviour, but spatial heterogeneity in risk, particularly the presence of refuges, can allow ungulates to persist in landscapes with high human and livestock densities.
Highlights
Wild animals are known to make remarkably complex decisions when selecting habitats, balancing multiple, often disparate costs and benefits, such as mortality risk against net energy gain, while accounting for diverse ecological factors that influence these costs and benefits, such as resource abundance, predator densities and competition [1,2,3]
Our findings support our hypothesis that when overall resource quality in the landscape is high, blackbuck are risk averse especially when making decisions related to human activities, whereas when overall resource quality is low, blackbuck are less sensitive to risk
Blackbuck appear to strongly avoid the habitat with higher risk: habitat-use was very strongly associated with habitat protection; blackbuck signs were consistently higher in protected habitats than in unprotected habitats
Summary
Wild animals are known to make remarkably complex decisions when selecting habitats, balancing multiple, often disparate costs and benefits, such as mortality risk against net energy gain, while accounting for diverse ecological factors that influence these costs and benefits, such as resource abundance, predator densities and competition [1,2,3]. Habitat-selection decisions are rendered even more complex in human-dominated landscapes, where costs and benefits are influenced by human-related factors such as land-use change [4]. Both the ecological and human sets of factors can vary spatially and temporally. In particular, is an important constraint on resource availability since quality decreases with age of the plant and increasing biomass, and varies with phenological status [8,9]. Ungulates respond to resource availability by choosing energy-maximizing strategies at intermediate resource qualities and time-minimizing strategies at high resource qualities [9,10]. Ungulate foraging strategies are overwhelmingly influenced by predation risk, wherein ungulates minimize the predation risk to foraging rate ratio [11,12]
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