Living on the edge: Multiscale habitat selection by cheetahs in a human‐wildlife landscape

Abstract

Animals select habitats that will ultimately optimize their fitness through access to favorable resources, such as food, mates, and breeding sites. However, access to these resources may be limited by bottom‐up effects, such as availability, and top‐down effects, such as risk avoidance and competition, including that with humans. Competition between wildlife and people over resources, specifically over space, has played a significant role in the worldwide decrease in large carnivores. The goal of this study was to determine the habitat selection of cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) in a human‐wildlife landscape at multiple spatial scales. Cheetahs are a wide‐ranging, large carnivore, whose significant decline is largely attributed to habitat loss and fragmentation. It is believed that 77% of the global cheetah population ranges outside protected areas, yet little is known about cheetahs’ resource use in areas where they co‐occur with people. The selection, or avoidance, of three anthropogenic variables (human footprint density, distance to main roads and wildlife areas) and five environmental variables (open habitat, semiclosed habitat, edge density, patch density and slope), at multiple spatial scales, was determined by analyzing collar data from six cheetahs. Cheetahs selected variables at different scales; anthropogenic variables were selected at broader scales (720–1440 m) than environmental variables (90–180 m), suggesting that anthropogenic pressures affect habitat selection at a home‐range level, whilst environmental variables influence site‐level habitat selection. Cheetah presence was best explained by human presence, wildlife areas, semiclosed habitat, edge density and slope. Cheetahs showed avoidance for humans and steep slopes and selected for wildlife areas and areas with high proportions of semiclosed habitat and edge density. Understanding a species’ resource requirements, and how these might be affected by humans, is crucial for conservation. Using a multiscale approach, we provide new insights into the habitat selection of a large carnivore living in a human‐wildlife landscape.

Conservation implications of sex‐specific landscape suitability for a large generalist carnivore

“…Sex‐specific space use and distribution range is possibly a widespread phenomenon that, while documented and acknowledged to exist, it is often not explicitly incorporated in applied ecology projects, particularly for terrestrial carnivores (Ahmadi et al, ; Klaassen & Broekhuis, , but see Nielsen et al, ). By developing separate spatial models for each sex, we have identified this limitation for black bears and therefore suggest that traditional SDMs might be overestimating the biologically relevant distribution range of many species, particularly if both sexes have similar overall requirements but different tolerances to disturbance.…”

“…Representing a species or population suitable range considering only their reproductive or breeding range is frequent for some vertebrate taxa, such as birds (Hitch & Leberg, ), yet this approach appears uncommon in other taxa. Typically, terrestrial mammal distribution models do not differentiate between sexes when making spatial predictions (Ahmadi et al, ), often because the type of data available (e.g., tracks, scats, sightings) prevents sexing of individuals (Dempsey, Gese, Kluever, Lonsinger, & Waits, ), but too when such data are available (e.g., telemetry; Duncan, Kahl, Gray, Salice, & Stevens, ; Klaassen & Broekhuis, ). This bias is often overlooked when managing wild mammal populations (Gordon, Hester, & Festa‐Bianchet, ; Rubin & Bleich, ), which is particularly important for species where dispersal behaviour and movement can vary with sex, such as in large carnivores (Zeller et al, ).…”

Determining multi-species site use outside the protected areas of the Maasai Mara, Kenya, using false positive site-occupancy modelling

“…The avoidance of humans has been shown for multiple large carnivore species (e.g. Schuette et al, 2013, Klaassen & Broekhuis, 2018) and is possibly a result of negative interactions with people (Loveridge et al, 2017). Leopards may be the exception, as they persist in many human-dominated landscapes (Athreya et al, 2013), but this was not reflected in our study, possibly because the high levels of grazing and agriculture reduce the amount of suitable habitat for them in unprotected areas or because they are difficult to detect.…”

“…Per 5 × 5 km site (see below), we calculated four measures of human disturbance using a detailed layer of human infrastructures such as buildings and livestock enclosures (see Klaassen & Broekhuis, 2018 for details). Firstly, we calculated the mean Euclidean distance of each site to the nearest human infrastructure (hereafter human distance).…”

“…Open habitat is mainly grasslands, semi-closed includes Vachellia ( Vachellia drepanolobium and V. gerrardii ) woodlands and croton Croton dichogamus bushes, and closed habitat is predominantly riparian. Closed and semi-closed habitat were merged, as the proportions of closed habitat were relatively low (see Klaassen & Broekhuis, 2018, for details). The proportions of open and closed/semi-closed habitat were then calculated for each site.…”