Manoj Agarwal et al. 2016, Volume 4 Issue 2 ISSN (Online): 2348-4098 ISSN (Print): 2395-4752

 

International Journal of Science,Engineering and Technology

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© 2016 Manoj Agarwal et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.

Monitoring Human-Leopard Conflict in Altitudinal Variations with Landscape Characteristics Using GIS and Remote Sensing in Pauri Garhwal, India 1Manoj Agarwal, 2Kunwar Sain, 3Devendra Singh, 4S. P. Goyal

Introduction

Wildlife conservation has been priority among scientists’ community across the world and carnivore conservation is one the main concern. More than 30 species of family felids found in world wide. Out of fifteen among these including five species of large

felids are present in Indian subcontinent. Leopard (Panthera pardus L.) is one of belonging to the order carnivore, family felid. Being the long range species, need much wider forest cover for their survival and the distribution of leopard in Southern Asia ranged all through from the forested regions of India, the

Abstract

Wildlife resources are very important components of a sustainable forest. All wildlife need food, water, forest cover and forest corridors for their survival. These basic biological needs are the most important components of the wildlife habitat in the forest. Carnivore is one of the groups; need much wider forested areas and corridors for their survival and to continue to exist in a region. There is a need to see how human and wildlife can co-exist by identifying and assessing the condition of wildlife habitats both within and outside protected areas.

Man-Animal conflict problems have been recorded across India. In northern India, leopards are common in the forests of Pauri Garhwal District, Uttaranchal. Most of the areas where leopards travel is insecure and putting human in direct conflict with wildlife. District administration is facing severe problem of Human-Leopard conflict where conflict rate is inclining due to degradation of quality wildlife habitat and natural prey, resulting leopards are naturally forced to move towards human habitat areas. In the present study, we have monitored altitudinal variations with landscape characteristics in relation to different level of human-leopard conflicts observed in Pauri Garhwal, district of Uttaranchal, India using GIS and Remote Sensing.

Landuse/landcover map at 1:50,000 scales were used for extracting the information about forest, non-forest and other habitat characteristics. Digital Elevation Model was generated for recording the information from low, medium and high conflict zones. Coded Grids of 2x2 km having information about level of conflicts were used for calculating the geographical area and percent area of forest, non-forest and other habitat characteristics falling in each zone (Chauhan and Goyal 2001)

In Pauri Garhwal District high conflicts have been recorded between 900 and 1500m altitudinal variations. It has been found that scrub is dominating with more than 50 percent where percentage of forest and habitation/agriculture is more or less equally distributed with 25 percent. On the other hand, least conflict prone areas inhabited by high percentage of forest and scrub with the ratio of 5: 6 respectively. The potential of state-of-art GIS and Remote Sensing technology has made possible to work in in-accessible landscapes like Pauri Garhwal, where altitudinal variation lies between 275 and 3200 m as well as predict any potential conflict areas in adjoining habitats in Uttaranchal.

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Indo-China peninsula, Southern China and the Island of Sri Lanka (Bailey, 1993).

Leopard has adapted well for its survival in different climatic regimes, prey bases and diverse landforms from savannah, rain forests, mountain elevation, and dense vegetation to low scrub and thickets and even quite close to human habitat (Edgaonkar & Chellam, 2002). Leopard has a much generalized diet where it stays with other sympatric carnivores (Sinha, 2003). Despite that wide-spread distribution and robust potentiality of adaptation, leopards have been greatly reduced in numbers over their vast former range due to progressive habitat destruction and fragmentation (Daniel, 1996).

Carnivore-human conflict is a worldwide problem for the wildlife management (Karanth & Madhusudan, 2002). Conservationists around the world are raising alarms over human-wildlife conflicts (Breitenmoser 1998; Karanath & Madhusan 2002). Carnivores feature prominently in these warning because some species cause serious economic damage and may even prey on humans. According to scientific survey and data suggest that human-wildlife conflicts are increasing all over the countries (Canover and Decker, 1991; Canover 1998)

During the last decades, data advocate many wildlife populations have recovered largely because of protection from overexploitation and the emergence of technology and application of wildlife management with the increase in wildlife population locally, human-wildlife conflicts have also increased. When large cats live in proximity to humans, some amount of conflict between them is inevitable (Sawarkar, 1986).

In India, recent studies (Edgaonkar & Chellam, 2000; Chauhan & Goyal, 2001; Athreya et al., 2004) reported leopard as the most common carnivore in human-carnivore conflict. Leopard – human conflicts have been reported from different regions of India like Maharashtra (Edgaonkar & Chellam, 1998; Athreya et al., 2004), Gujrat (Chaudhury, 2003), West Bengal- northern part (Raha, 1996), hill regions of Uttaranchal (Negi, 1996).

In Uttaranchal, Pauri-Garhwal district is the worst affected district in Uttaranchal. The conflict between human and leopard has been increased in many folds within the last decade due to change in landuse pattern and scarcity of prey species leading to

preference of soft preys like human and livestock (Chauhan & Goyal, 2001; Negi 1996). This district has already been divided into ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’ conflict zones based on the severity and frequency of human and livestock kill by leopard under the ongoing research project on leopard of WII (Agarwal et. al. 2005).

The present study is aimed to understand the conflict in context of altitudinal variations with landscape characteristics using GIS and Remote Sensing techniques. We have observed that the GIS and Remote Sensing technology can be used for predicting the areas where human-leopard conflict can occur in future.

Study Area

Pauri Garhwal is one of the districts of Uttaranchal, is worst affected area where number of cases of human-leopard conflicts have been increased. Therefore, this district was chosen as a study area to identify the cause for occurring conflicts. This district is a part of northern India and falls between lesser Himalaya and middle Himalaya. it is ranging from 78o 12 ‘ E to 79 o 14 ‘E and 29 o 26‘ N to 30 o 19 ‘

latitudinal.

The geographical area of the district is 5444.00 sq. km and is divided into two divisions namely Pauri and Lansdowne. Pauri division is further divided into 6 administrative blocks viz. Pauri, Kot, Khirsu, Pabau, Kalgikhal and Thailisain. Lansdowne division is having 9 administrative blocks viz. Dhugadda, Yamkeshwar, Jahrikhal, Bironkhal, Ekashwar, Nainidanda, Pokhra, Dwarikhal and Rikhnikhal. A large reservoir, Ram Ganga is situated in the Dhugadda block of Lansdowne division.

Climate and Rainfall

The temperature varies from 1oC minimum in the month of January and goes up to 45oC maximum in the month of June. Average rainfall in the district is 218 cm. in which, approximately 90 percent over the monsoon and average relative humidity is approximately 58 percent.

The Fauna

The fauna like Goral (Nemorhaedus goral), barking deer (Muntiacus muntjak) and sambar (Cervus unicolor) are common medium to large sized wild herbivores and troops of Rhesus macaque and

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common langur (Presbytis entellus) have also been reported from the area. Habitat also supports a fairly large population of domestic livestock.

Objectives

To characterize the landscape and assessment of various categories of elevation.

To determine the status of different levels of conflict in relation to vegetation types and elevation.

Methodology

Vegetation map was developed using LISS III data of Indian Remote Sensing satellite 1D was using hybrid classification technique (Agarwal et al. 2005).

Contours at 1: 50000 scales were extracted from Survey of India Toposheet and then Digital Elevation Model (DEM) was generated.

As per objective of the study, the digital elevation model was re-classed into 30 classes at 100 m altitudinal interval. Grids of 2x2 km were generated for entire Pauri Garhwal district and as per information gathered in the study area on cases of human-leopard conflicts and severity of conflict during survey in the year 1999-2000 (Chauhan and Goyal 2001). According to the collected information, all the grids were coded and then identified as low, medium and high conflict zones in the study area.

30°00' 30°00'

30°15' 30°15'

30°30' 30°30'

30°45' 30°45'

78°15'

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79°00'

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Thalisain

Kot

Pabau

Pauri

Khirshu

Kalgikhal

DugaddaRikhnikhal

Dwarikhal

Nainidanda

Jaiharikhal

BironkhalPokhra

Yamkeshwar

Ekeshwar

Block boundary

Cloud/shadowRiver/waterbodyHabitation/AgricultureDeodarScrub/woody scrubSal dominated mixed forestPine dominated mixed forest Oak dominated mixed forest

RS & GIS Cell

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0 5 10 Kilometers

Low conflict Medium conflictHigh conflict

Spatial distribution of human-leopard conflict over vegetation map

Re-classed DEM and land use/ land cover map were clipped with the coded grids comprising low, medium and high conflict zones. With the help of Spatial Analyst tool, tabulate areas were calculated for each grid falls under conflict zones in relation to altitudinal variations and vegetation and non-vegetation types.

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Spatial distribution of human-leopard conflict over re-classed DEM

As per the data set Digital Elevation Model was further divided into five classes as shown below:

Elevation/Altitudinal zones Class Conflict status

275m - < 400 m A No conflict

400 m – 800 m B Least prone

900 m – 1500 m C Highly prone

1600 m – 2300 m D Least prone

> 2300 m - 3200 m E No conflict

Results and Discussions

Area under low, medium and high conflict zones

In the altitudinal zone 400 m – 800 m and 1600 m – 2300 m, a total area comprising of low conflict was recorded as 36.59 percent while that of medium conflict was 25.50 and, 16.40 percent area was found

to be of high conflict. Similarly, between 900 m – 1500 m altitudinal zone high conflict zone is dominated with 83.60 percent of total conflict area followed by medium conflict with 74.50 percent and 63.41 percent area respectively (Fig. 1).

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Figure 1: Percent area under different altitudinal variations in conflict zones

Elevation between 400 m – 800 m and 1600 m – 2300 m

Due to the fact that number of small geographical patches ranging from .13 sq. km. to 6.6 sq. km. existed in low, medium and high conflict categories between 400 m – 800 m and 1600 m – 2300 m altitudinal zone. It was identified that in the low conflict the percentage of scrub was found to be 46.37 percent while that of forest and habitation/agriculture came out to be 39.88 and 13.74 percent respectively. Likewise, in the medium conflict zone the percentage of scrub, forest and habitation/agriculture is 43.80, 44.65 and 11.54 percent respectively. Finally, in the high conflict zone, percent scrub was found to be 42.94, percent forest was 46.38 and 10.67 percentage was identified in habitation/agriculture (Fig. 2).

Figure 2: Percent area under forest, scrub and habitation / agriculture in conflict zones

Elevation between 900 m – 1500 m

Elevation of 900 m – 1500 m reveals big geographical patches ranging between 7.3 sq. km. and 12.03 sq. km. area in all the conflict categories. Finally, elevation between < 400 m and > 2300 m, there is no conflict was recorded. It was found that in the low conflict zone, the percentage of scrub is 51.36 followed by forest and habitation/agriculture with 24.70 and 23.94 percent respectively. Likewise in the medium conflict zone 49.29 percent area was

scrub, 25.76 percent was forest and 24.95 percent area comprised of habitation/agriculture. In high conflict zone, it was found that percent scrub is 48.56 percent forest is 26.70 and habitation/agriculture having the least value as 24.74 percent (Fig. 3).

Figure 3: Percent area under forest, scrub and habitation / agriculture in conflict zones

Elevation 275 m - < 400 m and > 2300 m – 3200 m

It was found as per dataset, human – leopard conflict has not occurred below 400 m and above 2300 m elevation. Findings show that forest is dominant below 400 m elevation with 65.87 percent cover as compared to scrub and habitation/agriculture, which are 16.37 and 17.75 percent respectively. Moreover, it was found that at an elevation above 2300 m, 78.77 percent area is dominated by forest followed by scrub and habitation/agriculture with 16.39 and 4.81 percent respectively (Fig. 4).

Figure 4: Percent area under forest, scrub and habitation / agriculture in different altitudinal variations

Block-wise prediction

Results indicated that, In the present situation some of the administrative blocks are severely affected due to human-leopard conflict. Based on present research and trend, we can predict that in the four administrative blocks; Dugadda*, Yamkeshwar*,

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Dwarikhal* and Jaiharikhal* might have conflict problem (Fig. 5).

0.00

10.00

20.00

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70.00

Dugadd

a *

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shwar

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Jaiha

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l *

Ekesh

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Nainida

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Bironk

hal

Pauri

Kot

Pabau

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ain

Khirsh

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Per

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ea

Forest

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Figure 5: Percent area under forest, scrub and habitation/agriculture in administrative blocks

Conclusions

The current findings reflect that elevation 900 m – 1500 m is highly prone to human – leopard conflict because of the high percentage of scrub as compared to forest cover and habitation/agriculture. Alternatively, it was seen that in elevation 400 m – 800 m and 1600 m 2300 m, human - leopard conflict was found to be least. Prediction can be done through GIS and Remote Sensing, where human-leopard conflict can occur.

The GIS and Remote Sensing technology has proven time and again that it is a powerful tool in monitoring inaccessible areas in a cost effective manner and also used for wildlife management and conservation planning.

Acknowledgements

Authors are extremely thankful to the Director, Wildlife Institute of India for providing necessary facilities to carry out this work.

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Author’s details 1, 2, 3, 4 Wildlife Institute of India, Post Box 18, Chandrabani, Dehradun – 248001, Uttarakhand, India

Email: manojkumar@wii.gov.in

Copy for Cite this Article- Manoj Agarwal, Kunwar Sain, Devendra Singh and S. P. Goyal, “Monitoring Human-Leopard Conflict in Altitudinal Variations with Landscape Characteristics Using GIS and Remote Sensing In Pauri Garhwal, India”, International Journal of Science, Engineering and Technology, Volume 4 Issue 2: 2016, pp. 402- 408.

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