TIGER AND THEIR PREY BASE ABUNDANCE IN TERAI ARC LANDSCAPE NEPAL

Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation and Department of Forests October, 2009

Copyright 2009, Government of Nepal, Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation, Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation and Department of Forests

Authors: Karki, J. B. ; Jnawali, S. R. ; Shrestha, R. ; Pandey, M. B. ; Gurung, G. ; Thapa 2 (Karki), M.

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Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, Department of Forests National Trust for Nature Conservation, WWF Nepal Program,
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Central Level Steering Committee Coordinator: Director General, DNPWC Member: Director General, DoF Member: Member Secretary, NTNC Member: Country Representative, WWF Nepal

Central Level Technical Committee Coordinator: Director General, DNPWC Members: MoFSC, DNPWC , DoF , NTNC. WWF Nepal

Field Level Committees Coordination: Chief Conservation Officer of the respective PAs Members: Field Office in-charges of NTNC of respective PAs TAL Coordinator and Project Co managers DFOs of corresponding District Forest Officers Chairpersons of respective PA - BZs Commanders of respective PA protection units

A brief report on estimating abundance of tiger and its prey base in the Terai Arc Landscape of Nepal

Background The tiger is an icon of Asias natural heritage and ecological integrity, and has great cultural esteem. They have been serving as a flagship species to derive worldwide conservation attention not only to benefit them but also to facilitate the survival of other associated species. As an indicator of ecosystem health, securing the future of tigers in wild has far-reaching biodiversity implications. Ironically, tigers have now become unsafe for their numbers are rapidly declining. The current global tiger population is believed to comprise only 5 per cent of what was there just a century ago.

In Nepal, tiger (Panthera tigeris) populations are fragmented and are distributed mainly in four PAs - Parsa Wildlife Reserve, Chitwan National Park, Bardia National Park and Shuklaphanta Wildlife Reserve (Figure 1.1). In an attempt to save the remaining tiger populations, the Government of Nepal (GoN) devised landscape scale conservation strategies for Nepal under the framework of the Terai Arc Landscape (TAL) program in 2004 (GoN 2004).

The design of TAL essentially follows the tiger dispersal model and the TAL region (Figure 1.1) is recognized as one of the global priority landscapes for tigers (Wikramanayake et al., 1998). Ecological studies of tigers (Sunquist 1981, Smith 1993) and regional-scale conservation maps (Wikramanayake et al. 1999, 2004, Smith et al. 1999) however, show that TAL alluvial grasslands are among the highly threatened tiger habitats in the world (Figure 1). Conservation initiatives here require, more than ever before, a reliable ecological knowledge to undertake the scientific management of tiger populations (GoN 2008).

Knowledge about population parameters plays a pivotal role in virtually all aspects of conservation and management of the concerned species, making the application of biostatistics to estimate, animal abundance very relevant in the field of wildlife management. In Nepal, available tiger population estimates mostly come from Chitwan National Park. These are based on either radio-telemetry (Sunquist 1981, Smith 1993, Smith et al. 1999) or claims of being able to recognize a small number of individual tigers from their tracks (McDougal 1999). Although they provide a starting point, such methods do not explicitly deal with the two key issues of animal population estimation: incomplete spatial sampling of the area of interest and incomplete detection of animals even within the area that is sampled. It is now clearly recognized that population sampling approaches that explicitly deal with these two problems by employing

appropriate statistical models are essential for robust estimation of animal abundance (Seber 1982, Williams et al. 2002, Thompson 2004).

Our attempt here has been to establish reliable landscape scale benchmark data on the population status and distribution of the tiger and its prey base by employing cutting-edge science. Such data will serve as a basis for future management, facilitate objective assessment of the effectiveness of conservation interventions and help establish a body of empirical and theoretical knowledge to enhance the predictive capacity to deal with new situations (Karanth & Nichols, 2002). We also envisaged establishing permanent monitoring systems by following a standardized protocol. As the efficient implementation of a monitoring protocol depends on the knowledge and skill of field personnel, we created a pool of highly trained wildlife technicians amongst stakeholder and decision-making groups through capacity building activities. The information generated through monitoring activities needed to be stored systematically to ensure the effective data retrieval as and when required. Thus, development of a sound data base management system was also an outcome of this work.

The specific objectives were as follows;

1. Population estimation of tiger and their prey in Parsa WR, Chitwan NP, Bardia NP and
Shuklaphanta WR.

2. Assessment of tiger distribution both inside and outside of the PAs 3. Development of a database system for tiger conservation in the TAL of Nepal 4. Capacity building of DNPWC, DOF and NTNC personnel on technical skills and scientific
knowledge of tiger monitoring.

The funding support for this project has been provided by the Save the Tiger Fund (STF), US Fish and Wildlife Services (USFWS), World Wildlife Fund (WWF) US, WWF-UK, WWFInternational. The field implementation of the program was jointly implemented by the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC), Department of Forests (DOF), the National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC) and WWF- Nepal.

Figure 1: Terai Arc Landscape (TAL) of Nepal

Implementation procedure and major findings

Project implementation began by preparing the standardized tiger monitoring protocol and instituting an implementation mechanism under the leadership of DNPWC assisted by DoF, NTNC and WWF Nepal. Prior to the field surveys, extensive hands-on training sessions were organised to implement the monitoring protocol and thus to assess the abundance and distribution of tigers and their prey base in TAL of Nepal.

The survey followed three contemporary approaches of assessing animal abundance and distribution:

1. Camera trap surveys to estimate tiger populations in Parsa WR, Chitwan NP, Bardia NP,
and Shuklaphanta WR,

2. Line transect surveys to assess the prey abundance in the Pas, and 3. Habitat occupancy modelling to examine the tiger distribution patterns both inside and
outside of the PAs.

Figure 2. Training on monitoring techniques

Camera trap surveys were undertaken from December 2008 to March 2009 by systematically placing 150 pairs of passive cameras in designated blocks in all four PAs. With a total sampling effort of 10,305 trap nights in four PAs, we positively identified a total of 86 individual tigers (Parsa WR - 4, Chitwan NP - 59, Bardia NP - 16 and Suklaphanta WR - 7) on the basis of their unique stripe pattern on the body flanks, legs, face and tail. Using closed capture-recapture sampling framework as provided by Program Capture, we estimated a total of 121 adult tigers (i.e., excluding cubs and juveniles) in four PAs. Tiger densities were obtained by deriving effectively sampled area through the 1/2MMDM (1/2 mean maximum distance moved) approach. Density results were later cross verified with the Bayesian approach. As both the methods gave similar results (paired t-test; t = 1.538, df = 3, P=0.22), we report the density estimates obtained through the former approach. Table 1 shows a summary of tiger population status in four PAs (Table 1). Table 1. Status of the tiger population in the Parsa WR, Chitwan NP, Bardia NP and Shuklaphanta WR Protected Areas N Estimated tiger numbers SE 95% Confidence Interval Parsa WR Chitwan NP Bardia NP Shuklaphanta WR Total 4 91 18 8 121 0.22 17.79 2.5 1.41 4-4 71 - 147 17 - 29 8 -14 100 - 191 Density Tigers/ 100 km 0.72 8.08 1.76 3.23
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SE

3.23 0.06 0.26 0.60

The abundance of tiger wild prey animals were estimated by employing line transects surveys within the Distance Sampling framework. The field work was conducted during May - June 2008. A total of 463 transects were systematically surveyed for wild prey animals. We used software Distance Version 6 for survey design and data analysis. We analysed all wild prey first as one group in each PA and then, given the adequate number of observations, repeated the analyses by species. Suboptimal preys, such as hare and langurs, etc. were excluded from the data analysis as were domestic livestock. Table 2 summarizes the status of tigers prey status in four PAs.
Table 2. Status of the tigers wild prey in Parsa WR, Chitwan NP, Bardia NP & Shuklaphanta WR.

Protected Area

Wild prey type Animals 2 (km )

Density SE 95% CI

Abundance Animals 95% CI

Parsa WR

All All Chital Samber Wild boar Barking deer Hog deer

5.5 62.6 43.9 7.5 4.2 3.7 5.1 67.8 55.4 4.0 1.3 2.4 86.2 54.1 16.3 21.5

1.3 7.7 10.6 1.6 0.9 0.6 1.0 9.5 8.9 1.2 0.3 0.6 15.0 14.3 3.2 10.8

3.5 - 8.7 49.3 - 79.5 27.5 - 70.0 5.0 - 11.2 2.9 - 6.2 2.6 - 5.2 3.5 - 7.6 51.6 - 89.2 40.5 - 75.8 2.3 - 7.1 0.8 - 2.0 1.6 - 3.8 61.5 - 120.8 32.5 - 90.1 11.0 - 23.8 8.5 - 54.4

1334 38,319 26,849 4,567 2,573 2,265 3,143 22,124 18,053 1,310 421 794 16,994 10,665 3,187 4,246

841 - 2114 30,165 - 48,678 16,836 - 42,818 3,044 - 6853 1,742 - 3,801 1,618 - 3,170 2,134 - 4,631 16,831 - 29,082 13,191 - 24,708 738 - 2,325 271- 654 505 - 1,248 12,128 - 23,811 6,406 - 17,755 2,169 - 4,682 1,682 - 10,720

Chitwan NP

Bardia NP

All Chital Wild boar Barking deer Samber

Shuklaphanta WR

All Chital Hog deer Swamp deer

Not enough observations to examine individual species

During May June 2009 after the burning, habitat occupancy surveys were carried out across all four PAs, their buffer zones and adjoining potential tiger habitats. Ninety-six grids (15 x 15 km ) were surveyed for evidence of tiger as well as tiger prey and human activities (Figure 3). The later two variables served as covariates to model the habitat occupancy by tigers. Program Presence Version 2 was used to model the habitat occupancy by fitting the detection/non-detection data. The model incorporating prey index was the best performing model to describe habitat occupancy by tigers in the study area. The model-averaged estimate among top models of the probability of occupancy for a grid cell with prey index of medium-high was 0.94 (SE = 0.07). Where prey were ranked low, the probability of occupancy was estimated at 0.21 (SE = 0.06). The effect of the human impacts index switching from high to low only increased the probability of occupancy by 0.06 (7% increase) in sites where the prey index was already med-high. The model - averaged estimate of the probability of detection for surveys with an observer expertise index of good was 0.73 (SE = 0.05, Table 5.4). Using the top model with !AIC = 0, and AIC weight (w) of 0.59, the tiger habitat occupancy pattern in the TAL ranged from 0.24 (SE = 0.05) to 0.95 (SE = 0.06).
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Conclusion and recommendations This monitoring is a milestone for the tiger conservation initiatives in Nepal as it has established the benchmark data on population status of tigers, their prey base and distribution. This is especially true in the context that past attempts were made in different spatial and temporal scales and often with less statistical rigor.

Our camera trap survey revealed the presence of 121 adult tigers in Nepal. Compared to records from 2005 (GON, 2008), tiger population in Chitwan NP increased substantially while there is drastic decline in Bardia NP and Shuklaphanta WR. Prey depletion has been recognized as the single most factor driving the current decline of wild tiger populations and hence a significant constraint on their recovery (Karanth & Stith, 1999). Our results from habitat occupancy surveys are consistent with this. Comparing the influence of two covariates, human disturbance and prey availability, we clearly demonstrated that the habitat occupancy by tigers was more affected by prey abundance than the human disturbance. Whether the prey index was low versus mediumhigh was highly influential in predicting tiger occupancy. The 4 models containing the prey index covariate ranked as the top 4 based on AIC comparisons. Therefore, the prey base possibly constitutes the most important criteria for predicting tiger occupancy. Otherwise suitable areas that have depleted prey bases should be managed with an important focus on increasing the prey base.

However, there were additional human impacts not fully captured in the prey index covariate (i.e., human impacts on tiger occupancy in ways beyond influencing the relative abundance of the tiger prey base) as suggested by model 10 having a !AIC of 0.70 from the top model (and also note model 7 had a !AIC of 1.06 relative to model 9). Because the human impacts covariate incorporated livestock presence, the impact of humans on vegetation, fires and evidence of poaching mitigating these factors should be considered to increase tiger occupancy even in areas where the prey base is already deemed sufficient. This is particularly true in the case of

Shuklaphanta WR and Bardia NP, where the existing level of prey population appear to be adequate to support the viable tiger populations (Karanth et al., 2004). Increased incidence of tiger poaching in Shuklaphanta WR and Bardia NP in the recent times indicated the poaching as the most plausible reason for the decline in tiger numbers.

Thus, it is essential that management to focus on managing wild prey base of tigers and curbing ongoing poaching and trade in their parts for effective recovery of tiger populations in Nepal.

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