Habitat use and abundance of the woolly hare Lepus oiostolus in the Lhasa mountains, Tibet

Abstract

Habitat use, abundance and population dynamics of the woolly hare (Lepus oiostolus) were investigated in an alpine shrub-covering valley near Lhasa, Tibet. Counts of fecal pellets indicated that habitats outside the valley with heavily degraded shrub vegetation supported a small hare population, compared with habitats inside the valleys where vegetation was undisturbed, agricultural and hunting were lacking, and predators and herbivore competitors rare. Three types of shrub habitats with intermediate cover levels along with alpine meadow inside the valley were equally preferred by the hares, whereas willow-rhododendron, with the densest cover, was avoided. Transect surveys showed that the hare population density in the preferred habitats was 13 ind./km 2 in spring and 27 ind./km 2 in autumn. Out of seven years observations from 1995 to 2004, massive spring mortality of hares occurred only in 2000, leading to a marked population decline that year.

Reliably detecting snowshoe hares with winter track counts

“…Selection of appropriate survey techniques in any wildlife study depends on the spatial and temporal extents of the research question(s), logistics of data collection, and the study system (organism and environment). For members of the genus Lepus , common techniques for documenting occupancy, abundance, and habitat use include live‐trapping (often used with mark–recapture), visual detection surveys along transects, fecal pellet counts, and snow‐track surveys (Litvaitis et al , Marcström et al , Koehler , Shimizu and Shimano , Lu ); combining these techniques may be appropriate depending on survey objectives (e.g., Roy et al ). Some techniques can be reliable, such as using live‐trapping and fecal pellet counts to index hare abundance (e.g., Hartman , Litvaitis et al ); however, these techniques generally require multiple visits to the same location and are labor‐intensive.…”