Initiating conservation of a newly discovered population of the Endangered hog deer Axis porcinus in Myanmar

Abstract

The unprecedented political and economic reforms taking place in Myanmar offer new opportunities for biodiversity conservation. They also bring new challenges in the form of rapidly growing extractive industry and agriculture sectors that have been weakly regulated and are often unsustainable. The Endangered hog deer Axis porcinus epitomizes many of these conservation challenges, and those facing most deer species in the Indo–Burma hotspot. The hog deer has disappeared from large parts of its range as a result of overhunting and intense conversion of its floodplain grassland habitat for agriculture. We report on a population of hog deer that was discovered in the Indawgyi landscape in central Myanmar in 2012. We conducted the first rigorous assessment of a hog deer population in Myanmar using an occupancy sampling protocol, tested the protocol's robustness using a power analysis, and present the results to guide management intervention. The results from our study site revealed widespread occurrence of the species, with high precision. The population map was then used to inform the development of a conservation management zone within a UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve around Indawgyi Lake. The importance of this population for the status of the hog deer in Myanmar remains unknown because documentation of the species has been sparse. Our survey protocol could make a significant contribution to addressing this knowledge gap and setting an informed agenda for conservation of the hog deer both nationally and more widely across the Indo-Burma hotspot.

Structural Analysis and Phylogenetic Relationships of a Teleost Fish, Pethia stoliczkana Based on the Complete Mitochondrial Genome Sequence

“…of Axis porcinus. Previous studies on Axis porcinus focused on the mitochondrial genome for a genotyping (Hill et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2017) assessment of a hog deer population (Lwin et al, 2016) and for endoparasite assessment (Rana et al, 2015;Hussain et al, 2022).…”

Obtaining Sustainable Population Structures for the Management of Red Deer

“…However, while inadequate management leads to unintended situations such as evolutionary impacts on populations due to highly selective harvesting [1], or extinction of the population due to overexploitation [18,19], passive management, combined with the absence of natural predators, countryside abandonment, and large agricultural fields as an unnatural food source, can allow some wild animal populations to increase exponentially, causing the environmental and economic harm [1,[20][21][22].…”

Aplicación de un modelo matemático en la cuantificación de la sostenibilidad y el rendimiento en la gestión de poblaciones de fauna silvestre

“…Otras situaciones completamente distintas serían la sobreexplotación o la ausencia de explotación, ambos casos opuestos, pero igualmente indeseables. El primero de ellos conducirá a la población hacia la extinción (Johnson, Mills et al 2010, Lwin, Linkie et al 2016) mientras que el segundo de ellos, unido a la ausencia de depredadores naturales, el abandono humano de las zonas rurales y los campos de cultivo actuando como una fuente de alimentos no natural, permiten que algunas poblaciones de animales salvajes aumenten exponencialmente, causando entonces, los citados conflictos con los humanos (Macmillan, Phillip 2008) y con su propio hábitat (Smart, White et al 2008, Mysterud 2010.…”