Marbled cats in Southeast Asia: Are diurnal and semi‐arboreal felids at greater risk from human disturbances?

Abstract

Southeast Asia supports the greatest diversity of felids globally, but this diversity is threatened by the severe forest loss and degradation occurring in the region. The response of felids to disturbances appears to differ depending on their ecology. For example, the largely terrestrial and nocturnal leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) thrives near forest edges and in oil palm plantations where it hunts rodents (Muridae) at night, thereby avoiding human activity peaks. Conversely, we hypothesized that the sympatric and similar-sized marbled cat (Pardofelis marmorata) would respond negatively to edges and relatively open oil palm plantations as they are more arboreal than leopard cats, rely on tree connectivity for hunting, and are diurnal so have less potential to temporally avoid humans. We used camera trapping from Southeast Asia to test habitat associations at multiple spatial scales using zero-inflated Poisson generalized linear mixed models and hierarchical occupancy modeling. We found that marbled cats were positively associated with large intact forests and, in contrast to leopard cats, negatively associated with oil palm plantations. Furthermore, we found preliminary evidence suggesting marbled cats may adapt their diel activity to become more crepuscular in degraded forests, likely shifting their activity to avoid humans. These findings suggest that the marbled cat's International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List conservation status should potentially be upgraded from Near Threatened to Vulnerable, matching other forest-dependent felids in the region. We posit our findings may be generalizable such that semi-arboreal and diurnal felids could face greater threats from habitat degradation than their terrestrial and nocturnal relatives.

The rise of hyperabundant native generalists threatens both humans and nature

“…There is also an urgent need to improve disease monitoring of these species in this region, especially at edges where they are most likely to interact with domestic animals and humans. Further work on the top‐down control of pigs and macaques is required to understand fully the mechanisms driving hyperabundance of generalist species in tropical forest regions (Amir, Sovie & Luskin, 2022b; Hendry et al ., 2023).…”

Sunda pangolins show inconsistent responses to disturbances across multiple scales

“…From each study, we recorded the landscape (forest name and coordinates), the number of independent captures, and the sampling effort, and extracted a variety of spatially derived environmental variables (Supporting Information: Table S1). We grouped multiple studies from the same landscape each year by summing the number of independent captures and sampling efforts among the studies and averaging the environmental variable values (Dehaudt et al, 2022;Dunn et al, 2022;Hendry et al, 2023).…”

A multi‐scale synthesis of mousedeer habitat associations in Southeast Asia reveals declining abundance but few extirpations in fragments and edges

“…A jackknife test was used for estimating the relative contribution of each covariate on the mousedeer habitat suitability. For visualization, we used the Cloglog output to map the mousedeer habitat suitability, removing the areas outside the mousedeer's remaining potential habitat (Ke & Luskin., 2017;Dehaudt et al, 2022;Dunn et al, 2022;Hendry et al, 2023). We performed the calculations using the software MaxEnt (Phillips et al, 2023), QGIS and the statistical software R (Team, 2022) with the 'sf' package (Pebesma, 2018).…”

“…Fragments are embedded in a variety of anthropogenic matrixes, such as clear-cuts, timber plantations, rice, rubber, or oil palm (Beca et al, 2017;Nijman, 2013), and different non-forest land uses can have unique influences on wildlife within remaining forests, such as if crops provide food subsidies for pest species (Luskin, Brashares, et al, 2017). Other threats like poaching disproportionately remove larger animals from fragments and edges (Harrison et al, 2016, but see Amir, Moore, et al, 2022) potentially leaving smaller species as crucial members of degraded forest food webs and thus crucial to perpetuating species interactions such as herbivory, seed dispersal, and predation (Amir, Sovie, & Luskin, 2022;Dehaudt et al, 2022;Dunn et al, 2022;Gray et al, 2018;Hendry et al, 2023;Ho et al, 2023;Honda et al, 2023;Lamperty et al, 2023). Small resilient animals in fragments and edges may also experience release from competition with larger herbivores and release from predation, leading to positive associations with habitat degradation (Moore et al, 2022).…”

“…We tested our second hypothesis using mousedeer counts from published camera trapping studies and analysed this with generalized linear mixed models (glmms). Third, since predators and larger hunted herbivores are often the first to decline in forest edges and fragments (Amir, Moore, et al, 2022;Decoeur et al, 2023;Dehaudt et al, 2022;Dunn et al, 2022;Hendry et al, 2023;Honda et al, 2023;Moore et al, 2023;Nursamsi et al,. 2023), and because mousedeer have been reported from small forest patches, we hypothesized that release from predation and competition would produce a positive association with degraded forests (logged forest, forest edges and forest fragments).…”