Threatened mammals of India 659
seasons. The economy of the region is largely dependent on agriculture. There are 134 villages in the Bhagirathi basin, mostly below 2,000 m.
Methods
After a 3-month reconnaissance survey (July–September 2015), we conducted a camera-trap study at 209 locations, using 130 CuddebackC1 (Cuddeback, De Pere, USA) camera traps, during October 2015–September 2017.We positioned camera traps along an elevational gradient (500–5,200 m) representing various habitats. At each site, camera traps were deployed in locations likely to be used by animals, affixed to trees or, in alpine meadows, to a pile of stones, at a height of c. 30–45 cm above the ground (Sathyakumar et al., 2011; Bashir et al., 2013). To survey evenly across the various habitats, we divided the basin into 38 grid cells of 256 km2 each (16 × 16 km), which corresponds to the aver- age home range of the largest mammal in the area, the Himalayan brown bear Ursus arctos isabellinus. We subdi- vided these cells into 4 × 4 km cells and deployed camera traps in 3–4 of these smaller cells within each 256 km2 cell (Fig. 1, Table 1). In the fragmented forests of the lower areas, 30 camera traps were stolen, which prevented ade- quate coverage in all grid cells (Fig. 1, Table 1). We examined all camera-trap photographs of large
and medium-sized mammals (except families Muridae and order Chiroptera) and identified species with the help of Prater (1971) and Menon (2014).We assessed the elevational range (minimum and maximum elevation of occurrence) and habitat types used by each identified species based on camera-trap locations where they were captured.We calcu- lated photo-capture rates as the number of captures per 100 trap days, following Bashir et al. (2013; Table 2), and camera trapping days as the number of 24-hour periods from place- ment of the camera until the memory card was full or the camera was retrieved. Multiple captures of the same spe- cies within 1 hour at a camera site were excluded from trap rate calculation (Sathyakumar et al., 2011). We used photo- capture rates (mean ± SE) to assess the relative abundance of each species and anthropogenic disturbances (people, dogs and livestock). We examined the effect of habitat and human distur-
bance with generalized linear mixed models, using the glmmTMB package (Magnusson et al., 2017)in R 3.6.2 (R Core Team, 2019). For the generalized linear mixed models we used cameras (124 locations, 12,558 trap nights) that were active in both seasons or either summers (April–September 2016) or and winters (November–February 2015–2016 and 2017). Some of the smaller grid cells had more than one camera location. We therefore tested for spatial autocorre- lation among sampled locations, using the weighted corre- lation coefficient of Moran (Moran’s I)in ArcGIS 10.4 (Esri,
Oryx, 2021, 55(5), 657–667 © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319001352
TABLE 1 Distribution of camera traps used for surveys of large and medium-sized mammals along an altitudinal gradient in the Bhagirathi basin, Uttarakhand State, India (Fig. 1).We carried out surveys across two seasons per year (summer: April–August; winter: November–February) during October 2015–September 2017.
Summer (115 cameras, 6,677 trap nights) Winter (102 cameras, 5,881 trap nights)
Elevation (m)
500–1,500
Vegetation/ habitat type
Subtropical deciduous forest
1,501–2,500 Temperate forest
2,501–4,500 Alpine & subalpine habitat
3,501–5,200 Dry alpine steppe (cold desert)
Area (%)
29 22 34 15
No.
Mean ± SE trapping days
8 61.5 ± 11.6 20 65.4 ± 9.1 55 50.0 ± 4.9 32 65.6 ± 4.5
Mean ± SE distance (m) (range)
7,249 ± 535 (1,056–14,864)
24,789 ± 833 (400–75,853)
22,525 ± 276 (339–70,991)
8,814 ± 187 (420–29,931)
No.
Mean ± SE trapping days
7 40.0 ± 16.3 22 35.8 ± 6.5 40 66.5 ± 4.8 33 67.2 ± 5.1
Mean ± SE distance (m) (range)
7,234 ± 645 (300–14,655)
18,381 ± 526 (254–47,774)
24,360 ± 418 (300–70,991)
10,797 ± 232 (425–31,676)
Protection status Not protected
Not protected
Protected (summer: 11; winter: 11) & not protected (summer: 44; winter: 29) Protected
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