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The influence of prey, pastoralism and poaching on the hierarchical use of habitat by an apex predator

期刊

AFRICAN JOURNAL OF WILDLIFE RESEARCH
卷 45, 期 2, 页码 187-196

出版社

SOUTHERN AFRICAN WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT ASSOC
DOI: 10.3957/056.045.0187

关键词

African lion; occupancy; African carnivore; bushmeat hunting; habitat ecology

资金

  1. May and Stanley Smith Trust
  2. Wipplinger KL Bursary Found
  3. Wilderness Wildlife Trust
  4. Canada National Student Grants

向作者/读者索取更多资源

As an apex predator, habitat selection by African lions, Panthera leo, is primarily determined by bottom-up processes; however, increasing anthropogenic pressures may alter these relationships. Using camera traps and track surveys in the Limpopo National Park, Mozambique, we collected detection/non-detection data of lions and their prey and combined these with occurrence data on bushmeat poaching activities and spatial data on agro-pastoralist land use and other landscape features. We used hierarchical modelling within an occupancy framework to determine the relative influences of ecological variables on resource use and non-use by lions at two spatial scales. Habitat use by lions was most strongly influenced by the occurrence of their preferred prey across both spatial scales. However, lions were strongly negatively predicted by bushmeat poaching at the finer spatial scale and generally negatively predicted by agro-pastoralist activities at the coarser scale. Restricting our analysis to the home-range scale would have greatly underestimated the impact of bushmeat poaching on the ecology of lions. The results of our study illustrate the trophic dependency of prey resources to lions and the importance of considering scale when investigating species habitat use. Importantly, our study also demonstrates the limiting influence of bushmeat poaching on the use of habitat by an apex predator.

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