摘要
The snow leopard(Panthera uncia)inhabits a human-altered alpine landscape and is often tolerated by residents in regions where the dominant religion is Tibetan Buddhism,including in Qomolangma NNR on the northern side of the Chinese Himalayas.Despite these positive attitudes,many decades of rapid economic development and population growth can cause increasing disturbance to the snow leopards,altering their habitat use patterns and ultimately impacting their conservation.We adopted a dynamic landscape ecology perspective and used multiscale technique and occupancy model to better understand snow leopard habitat use and coexistence with humans in an 825 km^(2) communal landscape.We ranked eight hypothetical models containing potential natural and anthropogenic drivers of habitat use and compared them between summer and winter seasons within a year.HABITAT was the optimal model in winter,whereas ANTHROPOGENIC INFLUENCE was the top ranking in summer(AICc_(w)≤2).Overall,model performance was better in the winter than in the summer,suggesting that perhaps some latent summer covariates were not measured.Among the individual variables,terrain ruggedness strongly affected snow leopard habitat use in the winter,but not in the summer.Univariate modeling suggested snow leopards prefer to use rugged land in winter with a broad scale(4000 m focal radius)but with a lesser scale in summer(30 m);Snow leopards preferred habitat with a slope of 22°at a scale of 1000 m throughout both seasons,which is possibly correlated with prey occurrence.Furthermore,all covariates mentioned above showed inextricable ties with human activities(presence of settlements and grazing intensity).Our findings show that multiple sources of anthropogenic activity have complex connections with snow leopard habitat use,even under low human density when anthropogenic activities are sparsely distributed across a vast landscape.This study is also valuable for habitat use research in the future,especially regarding covariate selection for finite sample sizes in inaccessible terrain.
雪豹(Panthera uncia)是青藏高原南缘喜马拉雅山地的顶级捕食者,其中段的珠峰国家级自然保护区是雪豹的重要栖息地之一。随着保护区内外几十年来快速的经济发展和人口增长,雪豹面临许多人为干扰和栖息环境改变所带来的压力。为了更好地了解该区域雪豹的栖息地利用情况,以及人类活动对雪豹栖息地利用的影响,我们采用景观生态学动态视角,基于多尺度和占域模型开展了本研究。首先,我们在面积825 km^(2)的样地系统布设118台红外相机开展野外调查。进而依据雪豹生态学特性和当地环境特征,选取若干自然环境与人为干扰因子,并利用各因子间的组合构建栖息地利用模型,基于红外相机数据,分别对雪豹栖息地利用进行了冬夏两个不同季节(共计180天)的比较研究。结果表明,冬夏两季的最佳模型分别是栖息地(HABITAT)模型和人为影响(ANTHROPOGENIC INFLUENCE)模型(AICc_(w)≤2)。就模型总体表现而言,冬季优于夏季,表明夏季雪豹栖息地利用存在有未被探测到的变量的可能性;单变量模型表明雪豹在冬季倾向于利用较高崎岖度和更大尺度的栖息地(多尺度焦点半径为4000 m),夏季则倾向于利用平坦且小尺度栖息地(焦点半径为30 m)。雪豹对坡度的选择利用冬夏两季相同,均保持在22°且尺度焦点半径为1000 m。同时,在人口密度极低、人类聚落松散的自然景观中,人为干扰(村镇等人类聚居区和放牧活动)看似温和,却依然对雪豹及其栖息地利用有着较复杂的影响。同时,本文对于采用占域模型对稀有大型食肉动物栖息地利用研究的有关协变量选择具有一定启示作用,即在面对地形复杂、后勤补给困难的偏远高山地区,大样本量的监测数据获取成本高昂,在有限的小样本量条件下,可基于景观生态学多尺度探查思路对栖息地利用协变量进行有效选择。
