The flat‐headed cat 515
FIG. 1 The Kampar Peninsula, Sumatra, Indonesia, indicating the Restorasi Ekosistem Riau area where camera traps were deployed to detect the flat-headed cat Prionailurus planiceps.
and conservation, instead of being required to harvest tim- ber. The Restorasi Ekosistem Riau area comprises four adjacent Concessions on the Kampar Peninsula and one of c. 200 km2 on Padang Island, to the north. These Concessions are held and funded by the pulp and paper company Asia Pacific Resource International Holdings for 60 years. The Restorasi Ekosistem Riau area is delineated into three management zones (Table 1). Since 2015, surveys of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, plants and specific groups of invertebrates have been undertaken across the area, using a variety of methods, including camera trap- ping, to provide a baseline inventory of species. Here, we report the detections of the flat-headed cat. A total of 350 camera traps were established across c. 925
km2 of three of the four Concessions of the Restorasi Ekosistem Riau area in 2015. Camera traps were positioned singly and paired, alternately, across 220 2 × 2 km grid cells, in locations selected based on the occurrence of scent marks, scats and wildlife trails. Cameras were mounted on trees, 40–50 cm above the ground. Single camera stations were set to capture video, with a duration of 10 s, and paired cam- era stations to take still photographs with a 10-s time inter- val. All cameras were Trophy Cam type HD (Bushnell, Overland Park, USA). In 2018 we adjusted the survey design to cover a larger area: using only single cameras, we surveyed c. 984 km2 using the same protocols as for 2015–2017, with the addition of Hyperfire HF2X and HC500 cameras (Reconyx, Holmen, USA). Camera-trap effort across the sampling period 2015–2019 is summarized in Table 2. During 2015–2019 the camera traps detected five of
the six felid species known from Sumatra: the leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis,marbled cat Pardofelis marmorata and flat-headed cat, Sunda clouded leopard Neofelis diardi,
and Sumatran tiger Panthera tigris sondaica. The flat- headed cat was recorded five times in 2015, once each in 2017 and 2018, and four times in 2019; the latter records were 4.5–23.8 km apart. Given that these 11 records span 5 years and an area of c. 768 km2, they are likely to represent multiple individuals. The mean distance to a water source, such as a river or old drainage canal (the latter constructed for extraction of timber) was 351 m, with the farthest being 1.2 km, and the closest being on a river bank. The 11 records were at a mean altitude of 4m(range 1–7 m). Forest typewas relatively uniform across sites where the flat-headed cat was detected, comprising riparian and mixed peat-swamp forest, which was partly degraded where past selective logging has removed large diameter trees. Consistent with most previ- ous reports, 10 of the records were during 18.30–6.00, with most during 22.00–01.00, emphasizing that the species is largely crepuscular–nocturnal (Nowell & Jackson, 1996; Bezuijen, 2000; Meijaard et al., 2005). Diurnal activity is rare (e.g. in Central Kalimantan; Jeffers et al., 2019) and only one of our records was during the day, at 16.21 (Plate 1). The flat-headed cat has been detected only rarely by cam-
era traps (Wadey et al., 2016; Hearn et al., 2018; Jeffers et al., 2019), and thus these records are of particular importance, especially in Sumatra where there have been few previous published accounts of the species (Wilting et al., 2010). The 11 records indicate the importance of the Restorasi Ekosistem Riau area for this species. A species distribution model for the flat-headed cat predicted that Riau Province is the largest remaining forest suitable for the species in Sumatra (Wilting et al., 2010). This model was built with both recent (post 1984) and historical (pre 1984) records of the species, with a total of 107 records across the species’ range, 19 of which were from Sumatra but none from the Kampar
Oryx, 2022, 56(4), 514–517 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605321000132
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