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Do you want to know what drives livestock depredation by snow leopards? Our paper recently published in @Ecol_Evol provides important insights into snow leopard-wild prey-livestock relationships to guide human snow leopard conflict mitigation efforts. @ksuryawanshi #1
We compared whether the extent of livestock killing by snow leopards would differ in relation to densities of wild prey, livestock, and snow leopards at two sites—Upper and Lower Dolpa—inside Shey Phoksundo National Park in Nepal #2
We used camera trap-based spatially explicit capture-recapture models to estimate snow leopard density; double-observer surveys to estimate the density of their wild prey, the blue sheep; and interview-based household surveys to estimate livestock loss #3
We found that the proportion of livestock lost to snow leopard was higher in Upper Dolpa, the site which had higher snow leopard and livestock density but similar livestock density in comparison to Lower Dolpa.#4
Our results suggest that livestock depredation level may largely be determined by the abundances of the snow leopards and livestock and predation levels on livestock can vary even at similar levels of wild prey density. #5
We suggest that mitigating livestock depredation and hence human-snow leopard conflict and retaliatory killing of snow leopards require both measures to reduce/prevent livestock loss via improved herding practices, and measures to offset the economic loss.#6
We thank @Hello_MOFE for research permission and @NCBS_Bangalore & @BritishEcolSoc for partial funding and @WWFNepal, @ncfindia & @snowleopards for providing camera traps. You can read the paper online https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.6815 #7
Thanks to @CK_Mandal for a news story based on the findings of our study. Here is the link for it. https://kathmandupost.com/climate-environment/2020/10/06/snow-leopards-are-eating-livestock-despite-availability-of-preys-in-their-habitat-study-finds #8
Please drop your suggestions and thoughts at Khanal.joshipur@gmail.com and visit http://www.gopalkhanal.com/ to know more about my work. #9
Might be of interest to you and would love to hear your thoughts. @koustubh_sharma @SnowLeopardHope @rishieco @chacker414 @chagsaa @GSamelius @Explorer_Naresh @biologistimo @ran_murali @RakheeKarumbaya @HimalayanWolves @xiao_lingyun @SLF_PAK @KyrgyzstanSlf @Sahmoli @sm_kachel
Thank you @abhitims @akshaysurendr @chagsaa @Ishikamacaca @wsrgo @tsrasika and all my MSc classmates for useful discussions to get this work done.
