Browsing by Author "Soyumert A., Ertürk A., Tavşanoğlu Ç."

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Fire-created habitats support large mammal community in a Mediterranean landscape
(2020-04-01) Soyumert A., Ertürk A., Tavşanoğlu Ç.; Soyumert, A, Erturk, A, Tavsanoglu, C
Large mammals play significant roles in shaping the trophic structure of terrestrial ecosystems and affect the form of vegetation growth in many habitats. We studied large mammal community in a Mediterranean habitat mosaic generated by fires originally dominated by pine forests. We conducted camera-trapping surveys in three study sites with different fire histories, and we recorded eight large mammal species including brown bear (Ursus arctos), caracal (Caracal caracal), and wild goat (Capra aegagrus), which are of conservation importance. The mammal community found in the study sites was functionally diverse, including herbivores, omnivores, carnivores, seed dispersers, soil diggers, main preys, and top predators. The site burned 13 years ago had higher species richness than can be expected from a random pattern, but this was not the case in 30- and >40-year-old sites, showing the importance of relatively younger sites for large mammals. Eurasian badger had more probability to have more abundance in places with more open vegetation while wild goat had higher abundance in more dense vegetation. Young individuals of wild goat, brown bear, and wild boar were also detected in the study sites. The results indicate that burned habitats harbor a phylogenetically and functionally diverse large mammal community in landscapes originally dominated by Mediterranean pine forests. Therefore, these forests continue to retain importance for the large mammals after the fire, and burned habitats should be taken into consideration for the conservation and management plans together with mature forests in Mediterranean ecosystems.
The importance of lagomorphs for the Eurasian lynx in Western Asia: Results from a large scale camera-trapping survey in Turkey
(2019-03-01) Soyumert A., Ertürk A., Tavşanoğlu Ç.; Soyumert, A, Erturk, A, Tavsanoglu, C
Explaining predator-prey relationship is crucial for implementing effective conservation practices on large mammals. The Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) preys on small ungulates such as roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) in Europe, and on hares (Lepus spp.) in more eastern longitudes, but there is lack of information on the southernmost populations of the Eurasian lynx in Turkey. This study explores the spatial and temporal relationship of the Eurasian lynx with its two main preys, roe deer and the brown hare (Lepus europaeus) in north-western Anatolia using long-term camera-trapping data. Camera-trapping surveys were held with 173 systematic camera-trap stations at 10 study sites between November 2007 and July 2016, and reached to 53,995 trap-nights in total. To analyse the camera-trap data, we used a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) assuming binomial error distribution for presence/absence data and general linear mixed model (LMM) for the relative abundance data. In both modelling approaches, we considered the study site as the random factor. We estimated the overlap of daily activity patterns of Eurasian lynx with roe deer and brown hare using kernel density estimation. Both GLMM and LMM analyses indicated a significant spatial relationship between the Eurasian lynx and the brown hare (χ 2 = 22.4, P < 0.0001 and Likelihood ratio = 4.8, P < 0.05, respectively), but not between the Eurasian lynx and roe deer (P > 0.05). The daily activity of Eurasian lynx highly overlapped with brown hare (Δ 4 = 0.81), but we found a lower overlap between Eurasian lynx and roe deer (Δ 4 = 0.62). The findings reveal that the presence of Eurasian lynx is temporally and spatially synchronized with the brown hare in northern Anatolia, and support that the brown hare, but not the roe deer, constitutes the main diet of Eurasian lynx in the study area.