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Sunda clouded leopard Neofelis diardi densities and human activities in the humid evergreen rainforests of Sumatra

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2020

Iding Haidir*
Affiliation:
Kerinci Seblat National Park Authority, Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry, Jambi, Indonesia
David W. Macdonald
Affiliation:
Department of Zoology, Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, University of Oxford, The Recanati-Kaplan Centre, Tubney, UK
Matthew Linkie
Affiliation:
Wildlife Conservation Society, Bogor, Indonesia
*
(Corresponding author) E-mail iding.haidir@zoo.ox.ac.uk

Abstract

Most species of wild felids are threatened, but for many little is known about their status in the wild. For the cryptic and elusive Vulnerable Sunda clouded leopard Neofelis diardi, key metrics such as abundance and occupancy have been challenging to obtain. We conducted an intensive survey for this species on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. We deployed camera traps across four study areas that varied in elevation and threats, for a total of 28,404 trap nights, resulting in 114 independent clouded leopard photographs, in which we identified 18 individuals. Using a Bayesian spatially explicit capture–recapture analysis, we estimated clouded leopard density to be 0.8–2.4 individuals/100 km2. The highest predicted occurrence of people was at lower altitudes and closer to the forest edge, where we categorized more than two-thirds of people recorded by camera traps as bird poachers, 12.5% each as ungulate/tiger poachers and non-timber collectors, and < 2% as fishers. Our findings provide important insights into the status of this little known species in Sumatra. We recommend that the large volume of camera-trap data from other Sumatran landscapes be used for an island-wide assessment of the clouded leopard population, to provide up-to-date and reliable information for guiding future conservation planning.

Information

Type
Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International
Figure 0

Fig. 1 Study areas in Kerinci Seblat National Park (KSNP), west-central Sumatra.

Figure 1

Table 1 Summary of camera-trap sampling effort and Sunda clouded leopard Neofelis diardi detections in the four study areas in Sumatra, from an earlier study (Sollmann et al., 2014; I) and this study (II).

Figure 2

Fig. 2 Estimated Sunda clouded leopard Neofelis diardi density values derived from SPACECAP (box plots; black line in the box is the median, box is 50% distribution of the data, the whiskers represent minimum and maximum values, the circles represent outlier values) and associated occurrence of people (solid rectangles represent the median, whiskers represent minimum and maximum values) illegally entering each of the four study areas.

Figure 3

Table 2 Spatially explicit capture–recapture analyses run using maximum likelihood SECR and SPACECAP for the four study areas, with density measured as number of adult individuals/100 km2 in this study and an earlier study (Sollmann et al., 2014).

Figure 4

Table 3 Single season occupancy models for trespassers across the four study areas, showing occupancy (ѱ ± SE), 95% confidence intervals (CI), detection probability (P), number of parameters (K), Akaike information criterion corrected for small sample size (AICc), difference in AICc between the model and the best-performing model (ΔAICc), likelihood of a model to be selected as the best model, and model weight.

Figure 5

Fig. 3 Sunda clouded leopard densities across the Sunda region in Sumatra and Borneo, with results from the four study areas of this study in black, from other studies in grey. Whiskers represent density estimation ranges with minimum and maximum values. Abbreviations on the x-axis: Hill, hill forest; Lo, lowland forest; Lo-Hill, lowland to hill forest; Mon, montane and submontane forest; Pr, primary forest; PS, peat swamp; SL, selectively logged.

Supplementary material: PDF

Haidir et al. supplementary material

Tables S1-S4

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