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Monitoring rhinoceroses in Namibia’s private custodianship properties

Routinely censusing rhinoceros’ populations is central to their conservation and protection from illegal killing. In Namibia, both white (Ceratotherium simum) and black (Diceros bicornis) rhinoceros occur on private land, in the latter case under a custodianship program of the Namibian Ministry of E...

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Autores principales: Jewell, Zoe C., Alibhai, Sky, Law, Peter R., Uiseb, Kenneth, Lee, Stephen
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7430304/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32864211
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.9670
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author Jewell, Zoe C.
Alibhai, Sky
Law, Peter R.
Uiseb, Kenneth
Lee, Stephen
author_facet Jewell, Zoe C.
Alibhai, Sky
Law, Peter R.
Uiseb, Kenneth
Lee, Stephen
author_sort Jewell, Zoe C.
collection PubMed
description Routinely censusing rhinoceros’ populations is central to their conservation and protection from illegal killing. In Namibia, both white (Ceratotherium simum) and black (Diceros bicornis) rhinoceros occur on private land, in the latter case under a custodianship program of the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET). Black rhinoceros custodian landowners are responsible for the protection of the rhinoceroses on their land and are required to report regularly to the MET. Monitoring imposes a financial burden on custodians yet many of the techniques used involve expensive monitoring techniques that include the need for aerial support and/or animal instrumentation. During May and June 2018, WildTrack undertook a pilot study to census black and white rhinoceros on three private custodianship properties in Namibia. We tested three footprint identification methods for obtaining estimates of rhinoceros populations in an effort to provide less costly alternative monitoring options to rhinoceros custodians. The first was a full monitoring protocol with two components: (a) tracking each individual animal and matching them to their footprints, (b) identifying those individuals from the heel lines on the prints. The second method used simple visual heel line identification ex-situ, and the third method used just an objective footprint identification technique. These methods offer different options of fieldwork labour and cost and were designed to offer monitoring options to custodians that provided information about rhinoceros movement and location, with minimal disturbance to the rhinoceros, and best matched their human and economic resources. In this study, we describe the three methods and report the results of the pilot study to compare and evaluate their utility for rhinoceros monitoring. The first method successfully matched each trail photographed to a known rhinoceros at each site. When the other two methods disagreed with the first, they did so by failing to match single trails to a known rhinoceros, thereby creating fictitious identities consisting of a single trail. This failure occurred twice in one application, but otherwise at most once. We expect this failure can be eliminated through more stringent criteria for collecting photographs of footprints. We also briefly compare the use of footprint monitoring with other commonly used monitoring techniques. On this basis, landowners hosting rhinoceros can evaluate which method best suits their needs and resources.
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spelling pubmed-74303042020-08-27 Monitoring rhinoceroses in Namibia’s private custodianship properties Jewell, Zoe C. Alibhai, Sky Law, Peter R. Uiseb, Kenneth Lee, Stephen PeerJ Biodiversity Routinely censusing rhinoceros’ populations is central to their conservation and protection from illegal killing. In Namibia, both white (Ceratotherium simum) and black (Diceros bicornis) rhinoceros occur on private land, in the latter case under a custodianship program of the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET). Black rhinoceros custodian landowners are responsible for the protection of the rhinoceroses on their land and are required to report regularly to the MET. Monitoring imposes a financial burden on custodians yet many of the techniques used involve expensive monitoring techniques that include the need for aerial support and/or animal instrumentation. During May and June 2018, WildTrack undertook a pilot study to census black and white rhinoceros on three private custodianship properties in Namibia. We tested three footprint identification methods for obtaining estimates of rhinoceros populations in an effort to provide less costly alternative monitoring options to rhinoceros custodians. The first was a full monitoring protocol with two components: (a) tracking each individual animal and matching them to their footprints, (b) identifying those individuals from the heel lines on the prints. The second method used simple visual heel line identification ex-situ, and the third method used just an objective footprint identification technique. These methods offer different options of fieldwork labour and cost and were designed to offer monitoring options to custodians that provided information about rhinoceros movement and location, with minimal disturbance to the rhinoceros, and best matched their human and economic resources. In this study, we describe the three methods and report the results of the pilot study to compare and evaluate their utility for rhinoceros monitoring. The first method successfully matched each trail photographed to a known rhinoceros at each site. When the other two methods disagreed with the first, they did so by failing to match single trails to a known rhinoceros, thereby creating fictitious identities consisting of a single trail. This failure occurred twice in one application, but otherwise at most once. We expect this failure can be eliminated through more stringent criteria for collecting photographs of footprints. We also briefly compare the use of footprint monitoring with other commonly used monitoring techniques. On this basis, landowners hosting rhinoceros can evaluate which method best suits their needs and resources. PeerJ Inc. 2020-08-14 /pmc/articles/PMC7430304/ /pubmed/32864211 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.9670 Text en ©2020 Jewell et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Biodiversity
Jewell, Zoe C.
Alibhai, Sky
Law, Peter R.
Uiseb, Kenneth
Lee, Stephen
Monitoring rhinoceroses in Namibia’s private custodianship properties
title Monitoring rhinoceroses in Namibia’s private custodianship properties
title_full Monitoring rhinoceroses in Namibia’s private custodianship properties
title_fullStr Monitoring rhinoceroses in Namibia’s private custodianship properties
title_full_unstemmed Monitoring rhinoceroses in Namibia’s private custodianship properties
title_short Monitoring rhinoceroses in Namibia’s private custodianship properties
title_sort monitoring rhinoceroses in namibia’s private custodianship properties
topic Biodiversity
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7430304/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32864211
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.9670
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