Effects of free-ranging livestock on sympatric herbivores at fine spatiotemporal scales

Abstract

Understanding wildlife-livestock interactions is crucial for the design and management of protected areas that aim to conserve large mammal communities undergoing conflicts with humans worldwide. An example of the need to quantify the strength and direction of species interactions is the conservation of big cats in newly established protected areas in China. Currently, free-ranging livestock degrade the food and habitat of the endangered Amur tiger and Amur leopard in the forest landscapes of Northeast China, but quantitative assessments of how livestock affect the use of habitat by the major ungulate prey of these predators are very limited. Here, we examined livestock-ungulate interactions using large-scale camera-trap data in the newly established Tiger and Leopard National Park in Northeast China, which borders Russia. We used N-mixture models, two-species occupancy models and activity pattern overlap to understand the effects of cattle grazing on three ungulate species (wild boar, roe deer and sika deer) at a fine spatiotemporal scale. Our results showed that incorporating the biotic interactions with cattle had significant negative effects on encounters with three ungulates; sika deer were particularly displaced as more cattle encroached on forest habitat, as they exhibited low levels of co-occurrence with cattle in terms of habitat use. These results, combined with spatiotemporal overlap, suggested fine-scale avoidance behaviours, and they can help to refine strategies for the conservation of tigers, leopards and their prey in human-dominated transboundary landscapes. Progressively controlling cattle and the impact of cattle on biodiversity while simultaneously addressing the economic needs of local communities should be key priority actions for the Chinese government.