Effects of wildlife management and human disturbance on movements and activity of mammalian wildlife

Astrid Olejarz

Disertační práce

Abstract:

Humans exert various impacts on wildlife by modifying their habitats and interactions with wildlife through agricultural, industrial, and management activities. Consequently, wildlife responds to these pressures by modifying behaviour, habitat use and vital rates. This doctoral thesis aims to analyse the impact of various anthropogenic activities on terrestrial mammals through spatial and temporal analysis of their behaviour. For this purpose, I i) measured the effect of human recreational activity during the COVID-19 pandemic in a suburban forest in the Czech Republic on GPS-collared wild boar (Sus scrofa) movement and sleep behaviour, ii) analysed spatial behavioural plasticity of wild boar in response to drive hunts in the Czech Republic and Sweden, and iii) analysed, based on existing literature, the impact of supplementary feeding on the home range size of terrestrial mammals. I showed that wild boar was moderately vulnerable to high human presence resulting from COVID-19 lockdown related increased recreational activity in the forest. While movement and space use metrics of wild boar did not change in response to high human activity, they displayed higher energy expenditure and disrupted sleep patterns, which may have potentially detrimental fitness consequences. Similarly, wild boar movements showed resilience to increasing intensity of drive hunts. However, drive hunts generated a shift in wild boar behavioural response. With an increasing number of experienced hunts, wild boar showed predominantly flight behaviour rather than hiding during drive hunts. Frequent drive hunts repeated over the same area can thus lead to population dispersion with potentially negative impacts on crop damage and disease transmission. Using quantitative meta-analysis of the existing literature, I detected an overall tendency of reduced home range in response to supplementary feeding in terrestrial mammals. However, the effect was inconsistent with strength and directions of the trends depending on species biology, feeding regime and methods of data collection and analysis. These results suggest that complex mechanisms of home range behaviour can make it insensitive to manipulation with supplementary feeding as a universal tool in wildlife management. More comprehensive research and transparent policy in wildlife management are needed to better understand the anthropogenic impact on wildlife. Spatial analyses of animal behaviour are a crucial and future-orientated tool for detecting human-caused changes in wildlife and should be used for science-based wildlife management.

Keywords

Sus scrofa, supplementary feeding, movement ecology, wildlife management, anthropogenic disturbance, behavioural plasticity, COVID‐19 lockdown, home range, drive hunts

Jazyk práce: angličtina

Datum vytvoření / odevzdání či podání práce: 19. 10. 2024

Obhajoba závěrečné práce

• Vedoucí: Tomasz Pawel Podgórski, Ph.D.
• Oponent: Francisco Ceacero Herrador, Ph.D., doc., Francesca Cagnacci, externi, Simone Ciuti, externi

Česká zemědělská univerzita v Praze

Fakulta lesnická a dřevařská

Doktorský studijní program:
Global Change Forestry