1. Effective management of charismatic large carnivores requires robust monitoring of their population at local, regional and global scales. While enormous progress has been made to estimate carnivore populations at local scales, estimates at regional and global scales remain elusive. In the first systematic effort at a large regional scale, we estimated the population of the elusive snow leopard Panthera uncia over an area of 26,112 km 2 in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.2. We stratified the entire snow leopard habitat in Himachal Pradesh based on an occupancy survey. Subsequently, we conducted camera trapping surveys at 10 sites distributed proportionately, that is with similar coverage probability across the three strata. We conducted simulations to understand how unidentified captures could affect our model estimate. We also assessed populations of the primary wild ungulate prey of snow leopards -blue sheep Pseudois nayaur and Siberian ibex Capra sibirica.3. Our results yielded a mean estimated density of 0.19 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.12-0.31) snow leopards per 100 km 2 and population size of 51 (95% CI: 34-73) snow leopards in Himachal Pradesh. The density estimates for individual sites ranged from 0.08 to 0.37 snow leopards per 100 km 2 . Simulations showed that unidentified snow leopard captures did not seem to affect the accuracy of our model estimate but could have affected the precision. Wild ungulate prey density ranged from 0.11 to 1.09 per km 2 . Snow leopard density showed a positive linear relationship with prey density (slope = 0.25, SE = 0.08, P = 0.01, R 2 = 0.51).4. Our study shows the earlier opinion-based estimate for Himachal Pradesh to have been significantly positively biased. Using occupancy surveys to stratify large areas in order to design camera trap surveys addresses one of the common spatial sampling biases, that is limited sampling of only prime snow leopardThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
S h o r tt C omm u n fi c a tt fi o n B fi r d s o f tt h e K e r a l a A g r fi c u l tt u r a l U n fi v e r s fi tt y c am p u s , T h r fi s s u r D fi s tt r fi c tt , K e r a l a , I n d fi a -a n u p d a tt e K . A b h a M a n o h a r , A r j u n R am a c h a n d r a n , M . S . S y am fi l fi , E . R . S r e e k um a r , N fi tt h fi n M o h a n , J . A n j a l fi , A b fi n a n d R e d d y & P . O . N am e e r 2 6 A u g u s tt 2 0 1 7 | V o l . 9 | N o . 8 | P p . 1 0 5 8 5 -1 0 6 1 2 1 0 . 1 1 6 0 9 / j o tt . 2 4 5 5 . 9 . 8 . 1 0 5 8 5 -1 0 6 1 2 T h r e a tt e n e d T a x a T h e J o u r n a l o f T h r e a tt e n e d T a x a fi s d e d fi c a tt e d tt o b u fi l d fi n g e v fi d e n c e f o r c o n s e r v a fi o n g l o b a l l y b y p u b l fi s h fi n g p e e r -r e v fi ew e d a r fi c l e s o n l fi n e e v e r y m o n tt h a tt a r e a s o n a b l y r a p fi d r a tt e a tt www . tt h r e a tt e n e d tt a x a . o r g. A l l a r fi c l e s p u b l fi s h e d fi n J o T T a r e r e g fi s tt e r e d u n d e r C r e a fi v e C omm o n s A tt r fi b u fi o n 4 . 0 I n tt e r n a fi o n a l L fi c e n s e u n l e s s o tt h e rw fi s e m e n fi o n e d . J o T T a l l ow s u n r e s tt r fi c tt e d u s e o f a r fi c l e s fi n a n y m e d fi um , r e p r o d u c fi o n , a n d d fi s tt r fi b u fi o n b y p r o v fi d fi n g a d e q u a tt e c r e d fi tt tt o tt h e a u tt h o r s a n d tt h e s o u r c e o f p u b l fi c a fi o n .O P E N A C C E S S P a r tt n e r www . tt h r e a tt e n e d tt a x a . o r g I S S N 0 9 7 4 -7 9 0 7 ( O n l fi n e ) | I S S N 0 9 7 4 -7 8 9 3 ( P r fi n tt ) B u fi l d fi n g e v fi d e n c e f o r c o n s e r v a fi o n g l o b a l l y J o u r n a l o f T h r e a tt e n e d T a x a P u b l fi s h e r / H o s tt Funding: Kerala Agricultural University. Competing interests:The authors declare no competing interests. Acknowledgements:We thank Abhirami, C., Abhirami, M.J., Adhithyan, N.K., Aneesh, C.R., Anjitha, D., Ashmi, R., Clareena T. Jose., Jismi, M.O., Jyothi, K., Parvathy, V., Sarath, S., Sachin, K., Sreehari, R. and Vinu, J. for the support in the field. We thank Dileep Anthikkad, Jainy Kuriakose and Sandeep Das for providing the photographs of some of the species of birds used here. We are grateful to Praveen, J. and Suhel Quader for helping with the species identification and compiling eBird database. We also express our gratitude to The Dean, College of Forestry, Kerala Agricultural University for encouragement and support. We also thank the anonymous reviewers and the subject editor for their critical comments which greatly improved the manuscript.
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