Assessment Of Species Richness And Relative Abundance Of Small Carnivores In Natural Forest And Shrub Thickets At The University Of Dodoma

ABSTRACTS

Urbanization developments results in the loss and fragmentation of habitat, which can significantly alter animal communities. Wildlife species occupying higher trophic levels, such as mammalian carnivores may be especially affected by habitat alteration and concomitant losses of cover and prey. Tanzania has high carnivore diversity, 35 species or more, but relatively little is known about carnivore communities outside protected areas or the effects of urbanization on carnivore communities. I used remote cameras equipped with active infrared sensors to document carnivore species presence in the University of Dodoma area and to identify natural or anthropogenic factors associated with high carnivore species richness. I sampled 50 different sites during 2012–2013 and each camera was set for 5 consecutive sampling nights. I used Poisson regression to develop predictive models using carnivore species richness as the dependent variable. Among the shrub cover, distances to forest edges, buildings, roads and rock outcrops. I analyzed 9a priori models based on combinations of 6 different habitat variables and used Akaike’s information criterion (AICc) to examine the evidence for competing models. I detected 10 species of Carnivora, about 29% of the current Tanzania`s Carnivore species. Carnivore species richness per camera site varied from 0 to 4 species. Only one species of large carnivore, the striped hyena, was documented. Species activity patterns varied significantly; genets species were entirely documented at nights. The same was for bushy-tailed mongoose and white-tailed mongoose, on the other hand, slender mongoose and dwarf mongoose dominated the day time. Thus competition among carnivore species community in these UDOM habitats can be high as a result variation in active time