Different coexistence patterns between apex carnivores and mesocarnivores based on temporal, spatial, and dietary niche partitioning analysis in Qilian Mountain National Park, China

Abstract

Carnivores play key roles in maintaining ecosystem structure and function as well as ecological processes, understanding how sympatric species coexistence mechanism in natural ecosystems is a central research topic in community ecology and biodiversity conservation. In this study, we explored intra- and interspecific niche partitioning along spatial, temporal, and dietary niche partitioning between apex carnivores (wolf Canis lupus, snow leopard Panthera uncia, Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx) and mesocarnivores (Pallas's cat Otocolobus manul, red fox Vulpes vulpes, Tibetan fox Vulpes ferrilata) in the Qilian Mountain national park of China using camera trapping data and DNA metabarcoding sequencing data. Our study showed that apex carnivore species had more overlap temporally (the value of time overlap from 0.661 to 0.900) or trophically (the value of diet overlap from 0.458 to 0.892), mesocarnivore species had high dietary overlap with each other (the value of diet overlap from 0.945 to 0.997), and apex carnivore and mesocarnivore species had high temporal overlap (the value of time overlap from 0.497 to 0.855). Large dietary overlap was observed between wolf and snow leopard (Pianka's index=0.892) and Pallas's cat and Tibetan fox (Pianka's index=0.997) and suggesting increased resource competition for these pair species were existed. We conclude that spatial niche partitioning playing a key role in facilitating the coexistence of apex carnivore species, spatial and temporal niche partitioning facilitate the coexistence of mesocarnivore species, and spatial and dietary niche partitioning facilitate the coexistence between apex and mesocarnivore species. Our findings address, for the first time, niche partitioning was considered across temporal, spatial and dietary dimensions and diverse coexistence patterns of carnivore species were presented in the Qilian Mountain national park of China. These finding will contribute substantially to current understanding of carnivore guilds and effective conservation management in fragile alpine ecosystems.