| Amur tigers(Panthera tigris altaica) are extremely rare in China. Once found all across the Chinese northeast, there is now less than 20 individuals scattered along the border with Russia. In order to reverse this situation there are projects to recover this species population, and priority areas for tiger recovery have already been determined. One of these areas is comprised by the Changbaishan reserve and the forests around it. The objective of this study is to determine how suitable the Changbaishan region is for tiger populations’ recovery, from three aspects: ungulate prey availability, human impact intensity and habitat suitability.To determine prey availability, a field survey was carried out from 20/Nov/2012 to 5/Dec/2012, in which the snow tracking method was employed to determine which ungulate species are present in the area, as well as their abundance. 23 transects were set both inside and outside the reserve, in a total of 70.5km.Human impact intensity was analysed according to the methodology used in the Last of the Wild project, which consists in creating a human influence index image using spatial factors(images) with scores that represent human influence intensity. Habitat suitability was analysed for tigers and their two main prey: red deer(Cervus elaphus) and wild boar(Sus scrofa). This analysis was performed using a Multi Criteria Evaluation process(MCE), which consists in aggregating different scored factors that influence habitat suitability into a single suitability image. The factors used were land cover types, road density, distance to roads, distance to settlements, distance to human activity sites and altitude. Each factor was scored and weighted according to the ecological requirements of tigers, red deer and wild boars, and the outcome of the MCE was three habitat suitability images, one for each species. These three images were then combined, resulting in a habitat suitability image for prey and another for tigers and prey.Only three species of ungulates were found: red deer, wild boar and roe deer(Capreolus pygargus). Average encounter rates inside the reserve were significantly higher than outside for red deer(0.176 inside vs. 0 outside) and wild boar(1.621 vs. 0.400), but had no statistical difference for roe deer(2.485 vs. 3.137). Red deer and wild boar are the two key species of tigers, so their low abundance reveals that there is not enough prey for Amur tigers in Changbaishan.Human activities in the region consist of logging, poaching, tourism and forest product collection, and they are well distributed across the study area, posing a serious issue. Human impacts on the region were high inside the reserve, and low outside it. There were 5 human influence classes in the human influence index map: lowest, low, moderate, high and highest. The majority of the reserve(82.22%) was in the low and lowest influence classes, which means that it is relatively well protected from human impacts. Conversely, 68.18% of the areas outside the reserve were on the highest influence class, 5.97% on the high class and 19.34% on the moderate class, accounting for a total of 93.49% of the areas outside the reserve being above moderate influence, which shows that human impact is strong and significant outside the reserve.The results of the MCE show that there is little suitable habitat available outside the reserve. Suitability values were the lowest for tigers due to the high intensity of human impact in the area, and there was suitable habitat only in the centre of the reserve(4.26% of the total study area). The situation was better for red deer and wild boar, which may still find pockets of suitable habitat outside the reserve, but a combination of low forest quality and high human impacts makes it impossible for an ungulate community to flourish in the area. In order to recover tiger population in Changbaishan it is necessary to increase forest quality and decrease human impact intensity. |
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