Leopard density in southern Mozambique 407


FIG. 1 Xonghile Game Reserve, with camera locations and intensive trapping area within a 10 km buffer zone, as required by the spatially explicit capture–recapture models. Inset map: the Reserve in the context of the wider Greater Limpopo Transfrontier conservation initiative, comprising protected (grey) and non-protected areas (dotted).


(Efford, 2004). We fitted a Bernoulli or binomial encounter model to the data because this is most relevant to camera trapping studies; under this model an individual can be re- corded at different camera stations during one sampling oc- casion, but only once at each station (Royle et al., 2009;Noss et al., 2013). Given that male and female leopards have different ran-


ging patterns (Bailey, 1993; Kittle et al., 2017), with a potential impact on capture parameters, sex was modelled as a covari- ate (Sollmann et al., 2011; Tobler & Powell, 2013; Goldberg et al., 2015). This was achieved by fitting a hybrid mixture model, which accommodates individuals of unknown sex (Efford, 2015). The impact of sex on both parameters g0 and σ was tested through the comparison of four alternative models using the Akaike Information Criterion, adjusted for small sample size (AICc; Burnham & Anderson, 2002):


secr.0 (null model), secr.sex.g0 (g0 varies between males and females), secr.sex.σ (σ varies between males and fe- males), and secr.sex (both g0 and σ vary between males and females; Efford, 2015;Boron et al., 2016).


Results


Sampling effort and capture success Atotal sampling effortof 1,021 trapnightsby 26 stations (mean trap nights per camera = 39.3)yielded 57 leopard capture events.Of these, 31 (54%) were used to identify nine individ- ual leopards (five males, two females, two unsexed); the re- maining 26 events (46%)were not suitable for identification (because of poor image quality and/or the wrong flank being captured) and were therefore discarded. Capture


Oryx, 2020, 54(3), 405–411 © 2018 Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605318000121


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