Home Range And Habitat Selection Of Wintering White-naped Crane Grus Vipio Through GPS Telemetry In Poyang Lake, China

Recent technical advances in wild animal telemetry have enabled increasing accumulation of data with higher accuracy, which are essential to describe home range and movement in a fine spatial-temporal scale. And it also could be great beneficial to enhance conservation efforts. Up to now, the wintering ecology of White-naped Crane (Grus vipio) in China is still poorly understood, while its population was known sharply decreasing in past 20 years. In order to getting better understanding of their winter ecology, eight of White-naped Crane with GPS transmitters were successfully tracked during winter of 2013-2015 in Poyang Lake, Jiangxi, China.The data from GPS devices suggest that the cranes were intensely using northwestern part of the Poyang Lake National Nature Reserve as well as unprotected southern region of the Poyang Lake than other parts in the whole region of the lake. We estimated home range size of each crane and calculated GPS proportion of locations within both Poyang Lake National Nature Reserve and Nanjishan National Nature Reserve. The habitat selection of the cranes were also measured in different spatial scale. Our result shows that home range size of tracking cranes were varied from 30.52 to 996.42km2, the average home range size is 483.30+399.32km2 (n= 8), and the average core area size is 120.42+108.18km2 (n= 8). The overlap area size and overlap index are also varied among different individual’s home range, however, the core areas only have slightly overlap. It is worthy note that, the home ranges of crane No.Xo6 in two contiguous winters are seldom overlapped, while core areas were also segregated.The eigenanalysis of selection ratios shows that each tracked crane was choosing habitat type in similar way whether selecting its home range or habitat type within the home range. It is shows a significant selection on habitat types when comparing with available habitat in home range scale. Our data shows that White-naped Crane was prefer to choosing sedge and mud in wintering ground. However, there is no coincident difference between used and available habitat in the scale of habitat type within home range. While, our data also indicates that the cranes were prefer to select sparse emergent and mud for foraging site, but didn’t show significant selection of roosting site.In micro-scale of habitat selection, the logistic regression shows that the accessibility of food resource is the main factor for cranes’selection. And the principal component analysis also shows the main feature of foraging site is food resources. While, the security is the key factor for the cranes’ selection of the roosting sites. So far, this is the first study to describe the home range and habitat selection pattern of wintering Winte-naped Crane. Considering that inter-annual hydrology change, different movement pattern, and complexity of habitat selection, we suggest that more management and conservation efforts should be expand out of the reserves, especially for the southern region of Poyang Lake.