Home range and habitat selection of wild boar (Sus scrofa) in rural landscape

Abstract

Wild boars are cause crop damage and are vectors causing infectious diseases in humans and livestock, thus wild boar population management is essential to control the damage. Because information on mammal home range and habitat selection is important for the management of target species, accurate spatial data would provide valuable information to establish population management scheme and infectious diseases countermeasure. In this study, we aimed to understand the home range of wild boars and their habitat selection during the daytime and nighttime. We captured seven wild boars in in central Gifu Prefecture, Japan, and monitored each individual from October 2020 to June 2022. We calculated the 95% and 50% home range of each individual for the entire monitoring period and for short-term period. Additionally, we investigated environmental characteristics at GPS locations during daytime and nighttime. In this study, the home range sizes from the minimum convex polygon method ranged from 0.32 to 28.51 km2, and the maximum distance between the location points was 7.6 km. Moreover, wild boars avoided anthropogenic environments during the daytime and selectively used cropland category during the nighttime. Therefore, wild boars had narrow home ranges depending on the anthropogenic environments. Consequently, wildlife managers could reduce agricultural damage caused by wild boars by managing bamboo forests and abandoned cultivated lands in the rural landscape. For infectious diseases, moreover, they should implement countermeasures against wild boars that are within 8 km of pig farms.

How resource abundance and stochasticity affect organisms’ range sizes

“…Although it is impossible for 𝜇(𝑡) and 𝜎 2 (𝑡) to increase linearly forever, these examples are useful to demonstrate that linear changes in 𝜇(𝑡) and 𝜎 2 (𝑡) affect 𝐻 nonlinearly. Cyclical oscillations in E(𝑅) and Var(𝑅) may occur in urban environments as human activity changes within and between days(Péron et al 2017;Ikeda et al 2022) and as temperatures fluctuate daily and seasonally(Geremia et al 2019;…”