M Sc Dissertation(WII)

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Author: search.filters.author.Habib, BilalSubject: search.filters.subject.Impact

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    Assessing the Impacts of Road Network on Wildlife Corridors and Mitigation Measures in Assam : Transportation Against Animal Corridor
    (Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, 2021) Borgohain, Roshme; Habib, Bilal; Ramesh, C.
    Protected Area Networks (PA) and Conservation Areas (CA) are very essential for ensuring the conservation of wildlife. However, the connectivity among these protected areas is much more important to ensure the viable population of species. Furthermore, the increase in infrastructural development and human encroachment leading to the fragmentation of forests and the natural habitat of wildlife species. The wildlife corridors are the essential structures to connect the fragmented areas, ensure the viability of the isolated population, restores the genetic variations, corridors also increases the habitat diversity in the two habitat patches that it connects, it provides a passage for migration and also acts as an escape route in cases of fire in one patch. Overall wildlife corridors are structures that are important for conservation. Although these protected areas were not well connected the corridor structures help to maintain the continuity of the area. The state falls under North-East India Biogeographic zones under the Province North-East-East-Brahmaputra Valley (9B), (Rodgers and Panwar 1998). In Assam, there are seven National Parks and twenty Wildlife Sanctuaries occupying the area of 3925+ sq. km, where two are designated as World Heritage site (WHS) which is the highest designation given to the protected area. Out of twenty-seven protected area in Assam, fifteen were bifurcated by road networks and there are total eleven corridors, connects the protected areas, eight corridors were cut at multiple places by roads. These connections of the corridors are essential to maintain the contiguous landscape, which is further essential for maintaining the integrity of the WHS. In this study, I have tried to look at the current status of the wildlife corridor portion bifurcated by the road networks in Assam. The objective of the study is 1) What is the extent of different types of road networks concerning PAs and corridors in the State of Assam? 2) What is the land use pattern near the corridor bifurcated by the road? 3) Characterize the current status of the corridor sites impacted by the road network.
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    Subsidized Mammals: Understanding the mammalian interactions with garbage sites around Western- Rajaji Tiger Reserve, Uttarakhand
    (Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, 2024) Nagarale, Shashank; Habib, Bilal; Shrotriya, Shivam; Pandav, Bivash
    Anthropogenic food subsidies in the form of garbage dumps are widespread across the globe. When such sites are found around protected areas/wildlife habitats, wildlife is observed to exploit these subsidies as food resources. Foraging on such human-derived foods may have a negative or positive impact on individual to community/ecosystem levels. It becomes important to know the species associated with garbage dumps when found around protected areas and understand the interactions happening at the garbage dumps. This study was conducted aiming to know the animals at risk and also increase our understanding of these novel setups. I deployed 13 IR camera traps at total 10 garbage sites resulting in a cumulative effort of 437 trap nights at the garbage site. The camera trap data was processed using Megadetector & SpSeg packages in python. This data was used to get the Relative Abundance Index with respect to 437 trap nights. Sambar (RAI= 8.35) was the species with the highest visitations at the garbage site, followed by Indian crested porcupine (RAI= 2.70) and spotted deer (RAI= 2.15). Synanthropes like rhesus macaque (RAI= 1.78 ) and wild pig (RAI= 1.67) were the most visitors following spotted deer. I hypothesised that synanthropic species will have higher visitations because of distribution outside protected areas, followed by omnivores from the forest area as compared to herbivores and carnivores from the forest areas because of their ability to exploit larger variety of food resources. The data from this study rejected this hypothesis as forest dwelling species like sambar and Indian crested porcupine visited these sites more as compared to other synanthropes. Lesser visitations by omnivores like golden jackal, small indian civet, small indian mongoose; carnivore like common leopard along with scavenger striped hyena was a result of the less percentage of poultry waste (0.33% at only one site) in the garbage sites. I collected data on variables such as distance of the garbage site from the protected area, human infrastructure and waterbody, also quantified the size of the garbage site in terms of perimeter, NDVI difference between the protected area and garbage site as a surrogate of vegetation cover, relative abundance of each species in the adjoining protected area and calculated the composite RAI values of human, dogs/cats and livestock as a disturbance measure . I quantified the garbage in broader categories using a 1 m2 quadrat which was divided into smaller sets of 25x25 cm2. A total of 39 plots were laid for all the garbage site. The categories quantified were food wrappers & food disposables, food materials, religious offerings, agriculture discards, dung plates, sanitary waste, construction waste, carcass & poultry waste, pharmaceutical waste, cloths and plastic and others. The relation between relative abundances within protected area and visitations at the garbage site was assessed using Spearman correlation test along with Wilcoxon test p-values. With the available dataset I used ANOSIM using ‘vegan’ package in R program v4.1.2 to investigate the effect by considering the dissimilarity of the communities between sites based on the RAI values of the species for each garbage site. Relative abundance from protected area was not related to visitation of the species at the garbage site. Out of the selected variables, the ANOSIM values suggested the effect of ‘distance between garbage site and protected area’ on forest species and synanthropes. The effect of the ‘size of garbage site’ on the species could not be tested as there was not much variation in the sizes of the garbage sites. Human, dogs/cats and livestock presence affected the forest species, suggesting their sensitivity towards disturbances, while synanthropes were found to have affinity with the NDVI difference between protected area and garbage sites (vegetation cover at the garbage site) and the ‘percentage of food materials available in the garbage site’. To understand the co-occurrences at the garbage site, I modified the probabilistic models for co-occurrences (Veech, 2013) to get pair-wise associations at the temporal scale of one hour. A total 13 mammals avoided co-occurring with humans (and vehicle) while nine with livestock and dogs. Co-occurrences were found to be there between sambar and Indian crested porcupine at two out of three religious sites and at a household site, suggesting high tolerance levels to each other’s presence at the garbage site to exploit the resources. One of the sites was visited by barking deer with spotted deer group/herd. This association by solitary living barking deer can be for foraging effectively by reducing vigilance efforts in a group.
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    Impacts of Road Related Disturbances on Mammalian and Vegetational Assemblages : A Case Study of SH-33 Passing Through Nagarahole Tiger Reserve, Karnataka
    (Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, 2019) Siva, R.; Habib, Bilal; Gubbi, Sanjay
    Upcoming economies such as India need to strengthen their road network for the socioeconomic development of the country. While roads are important to the country, they are a threat to wildlife when they pass through the protected areas and other ecologically sensitive areas. Multiple impacts of roads on wildlife range from habitat loss, edge effects, vehicular traffic, pollution, animal mortality, barrier effect to invasion by alien flora and fauna. This project revealed the impacts of road-related disturbances on mammals and vegetation in Nagarahole Tiger Reserve, Karnataka. Mysore-Mananthavadi road (SH-33) is passing through the southern part of Nagarahole Tiger Reserve that has two segments in which one segment is decommissioned and another segment is closed for the vehicular traffic during the night. Here, I have compared the habitat use of mammals in these two segments using camera traps and assessed the impact of road-related disturbances on vegetation in this road by vegetation sampling. Vehicular density was estimated using the camera traps in these two segments.The study results revealed the avoidance of vehicular traffic segment by the mammals and activity pattern seems to be relatively unaffected by the vehicular traffic. It also shows the change in the vegetation composition and spread of invasive species due to road related disturbances.
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    The serprntine devil: roads in the wood - a study on the impacts of a national highway on wildlife in Haridwar Forest Division
    (Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, 2017) Sultan; Pandav, Bivash; Habib, Bilal
    1. The ongoing and reckless development of linear infrastructure around the world can well be compared to sweet venom. Sweet for humans, venom for wildlife. Roads in particular, entail wide ranging impacts on wildlife. The most conspicuous of all is wildlife mortalities due to collision with vehicles. Of the indirect impacts i.e., barrier effects are the most widely acknowledged. For wild animals, these effects can lead to the development of avoidance behaviour (road avoidance, vehicle avoidance and traffic emission avoidance). Road densities around the world are expected to increase rapidly in the near future which will magnify the impact on natural habitats. It is therefore imperative to study the ill effects of roads, factors influencing them and suggest effective mitigations measures. 2. My study aimed to understand the impacts of a 30km stretch of National Highway 74 on wildlife in Haridwar Forest Division. The highway bisects the intensive study area (150 sq km.), cutting through three wildlife rich forest ranges of the Haridwar Forest Division. The highway carries a huge traffic volume and a high number of road-kills have been reported in the past. 3. The study was carried out with the following objectives: 1. to understand the extent of wildlife mortalities and the factors governing them ii. to understand ungulate habitat use and density distribution with respect to road iii. to suggest effective mitigation measures that can minimise the impact of NH- 74 on wildlife in the study area