Spatiotemporal dynamics of wild herbivore species richness and occupancy across a savannah rangeland: Implications for conservation

Abstract Private lands are critical for maintaining biodiversity beyond protected areas. Across Kenyan rangelands, wild herbivores frequently coexist with people and their livestock. Human population and livestock numbers are projected to increase dramatically over the coming decades. Therefore, a better understanding of wildlife-livestock interactions and their consequences for biodiversity conservation on private lands is needed. We used a Bayesian hierarchical, multi-species and multi-year occupancy model on aerial survey data of 15 wild-herbivore species, spanning 15 years (2001–2016) to investigate a) spatiotemporal trends in species occurrence and richness across a mosaic of properties with different land uses in Laikipia County, central Kenya; and b) the effects of distance to water, vegetation and livestock relative abundance on species occurrence and richness. Although mean herbivore species richness varied little over time, we observed high spatial variation in species occurrence across Laikipia, mainly driven by negative effects of high livestock relative abundance. As expected, ‘wildlife friendly’ properties had higher herbivore species richness than other areas. However, high variability suggests that some pastoral properties support rich herbivore communities. The area occupied by five species with global conservation concerns (reticulated giraffe, Grevy's zebra, Beisa Oryx, Defassa waterbuck and gerenuk) and for which Laikipia County is one of the last refuges was

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Biological Conservation

• Publication date

  2020-02-01

• Fields of study

  Geography, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108436
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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