Status of tigers, co-predator and prey in Painganga Wildlife Sanctuary 2021

Abstract

Phase IV monitoring for the Painganga Wildlife Sanctuary was conducted from February – April 2021 as part of the project “Long Term Monitoring of Tigers, Co-Predators and Prey species in Vidarbha Landscape, Maharashtra, India”. The exercise aimed to cover an area of 399.98 km2 of the entire sanctuary. The objective of Phase IV Monitoring is to estimate the minimum number of tigers in the sanctuary using Spatially-Explicit-Capture-Recapture Sampling and density estimation of prey base using Distance Sampling. 45 pairs of camera traps were placed in the forested area of Painganga Wildlife Sanctuary following a sampling grid of 2 sq. km. in one block. The camera traps were active for 30 days yielding a sampling effort of 1722 trap nights of data which is used for further analysis. The minimum number of tigers and leopards individuals identified are 2 and 10 respectively. Tiger density per 100 sq. km. based on the Spatially Explicit Capture-Recapture (SECR) model could not be estimated due to low sample size while that of leopards based on the same method was 3.86 (SE ±0.165). To estimate prey density, 66 line-transects were laid randomly all over the division and were sampled 7 replicates during the sampling period, with a total walking effort of 924 km. The observations include Chital (Axis axis), Sambar (Rusa unicolor), Nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus), Chousingha (Tetracerus quadricornis), Langur (Semnopithecus sp), Wild Boar (Sus scrofa), Chinkara (Gazella bennettii), Blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra), Indian Hare (Lepus nigricollis) and Peafowl (Pavo cristatus). As per the observations, Nilgai (n = 236) is the most observed species followed by Langur, Chital, and Wild Boar. The overall prey density of Painganga WLS is 35.142 (SE ± 4.2723). Due to a low number of observations density estimation was not carried out for Chousingha, Chinkara, Blackbuck, Indian Hare, Peafowl, Sambar. To study the activity, we used the camera trap images. The times recorded on camera trap photos provide information on the period during the day that a species is most active. Species active at the same periods may interact as predator and prey, or as competitors. Sensors that record active animals (e.g. camera traps) build up a record of the distribution of activity over the day. Records are more frequent when animals are more active and less frequent or absent when animals are inactive. The area under the distribution of records thus contains information on the overall level of activity in a sampled population. We used IDW (Inverted distance weighted) to map the intensive area used by different animal species.