Understanding the distribution and fine-scale habitat selection of mesocarnivores along a habitat quality gradient in western Himalaya
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Human activities have resulted in a rapid increase of modified habitats in proximity to wildlife habitats in the Himalaya. However, it is crucial to understand the extent to which human habitat modification affects wildlife. Mesocarnivores generally possess broader niches than large carnivores and adapt quickly to human activities. Here, we use a case study in the western Himalaya to test the hypothesis that human disturbance influenced mesocarnivore habitat use. Methods: We used camera trapping and mitochondrial DNA-based species identification from faecal samples to obtain mesocarnivore detections. We then compared the responses of mesocarnivores between an anthropogenic site and a less disturbed park along a contiguous gradient in habitat quality. The non-linear pattern in species-specific habitat selection and factors responsible for space usage around villages was captured using hierarchical generalized additive modelling (HGAM) and non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) ordination. Results: Wildlife occurrences along the gradient varied by species. Leopard cat and red fox were the only terrestrial mesocarnivores that occurred in both anthropogenic site and park. We found a shift in habitat selection from less disturbed habitat in the park to disturbed habitat in anthropogenic site for the species detected in both the habitat types. For instance, red fox showed habitat selection towards high terrain ruggedness (0.5 to 0.7 TRI) and low NDVI (−0.05 to 0.2) in the park but no such specific selection in anthropogenic site. Further, leopard cat showed habitat selection towards moderate slope (20°) and medium NDVI (0.5) in park but no prominent habitat selections in anthropogenic site. The results revealed their constrained behaviour which was further supported by the intensive site usage close to houses, agricultural fields and human trails in villages. Conclusions: Our results indicate shifts in habitat selection and intensive site usage by mesocarnivores in the human-modified habitat. In future, this suggests the possibility of conflict and disease spread affecting both the people and wildlife. Therefore, this study highlights the requisite to test the wildlife responses to rapidly growing human expansions in modified habitats to understand the extent of impact. The management strategies need to have an integrated focus for further expansions of modified habitat and garbage disposal strategies, especially in the human-wildlife interface area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | high |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".