Varun Rshav Goswami

Effective and predictive biodiversity conservation strategies in human‐modified ecosystems require a sound understanding of community assembly. Three key mechanisms—homogeneous selection, neutral assembly and variable selection—have been postulated to influence assembly. These mechanisms often change spatiotemporally over disturbance gradients driven by niche availability. We evaluate how land cover interacts with season to alter assembly mechanisms and species richness of a bird community in a tropical forest‐agriculture mosaic. We focus on three land covers—small‐scale agriculture, community‐managed forests and a protected area—representing a forest disturbance gradient from most to least disturbed, across three seasons—post‐monsoon, winter and pre‐monsoon. We use functional dispersion as a metric combined with a null modelling approach to quantify changes in assembly mechanisms. We use multi‐species occupancy modelling to obtain probabilities of site use by species, corrected for imperfect detection, from which we estimate functional dispersion and species richness. Within the protected area, assembly mechanisms varied seasonally, shifting between variable selection, neutral assembly and homogeneous selection and had communities that were more functionally differentiated. In contrast, small‐scale agriculture and community‐managed forests witnessed only neutral assembly and homogeneous selection, associated with reduced niche availability. Habitat structure played an additional mediating role, with high bamboo, understorey and forest cover increasing functional differentiation. Species richness showed limited variation across land covers but composition changed. However, richness was higher in the protected area during winter. Species richness varied across seasons, being highest during the post‐monsoon season. High canopy and understorey cover increased species richness. Synthesis and applications . Our study provides novel insights into how tropical small‐scale agriculture subtly impacts seasonal assembly dynamics of forest bird communities leading to increased neutrality and homogeneous selection. We recommend that even for small‐scale farms in forest‐agriculture mosaics, high levels of canopy, bamboo, understorey and surrounding forest cover should be maintained. This could be facilitated by shifting away from non‐canopied crops and monocultures, and promoting agro‐forestry alternatives with native trees. Furthermore, we recommend that community forests should be managed to resemble contiguous stands of high‐integrity forests that can conserve assembly dynamics as found in protected areas.

The seasonal use of caves by bats can be attributed to physiologically demanding activities like mating and reproduction in spring and torpor in winter. Cave use, however, varies within and across species and can depend on the physical and microclimatic conditions of the caves. Understanding the current patterns and predictors of cave use is therefore crucial to develop a reference for assessing the response of bats to future changes in climatic conditions. We quantified the diversity and abundance of bats in 41 caves that varied in structure and temperature across a seasonal (mid‐winter, late‐winter and early‐spring) and an elevational (400–2700 m above sea level) gradient in the central Himalayas. Richness and abundance of bat species exhibited seasonal variation, with more species and individuals present in caves during early‐spring (n = 15) compared to mid‐winter (n = 9). Species richness declined linearly with elevation in mid‐winter but remained relatively similar until 900 msl and then declined in late‐winter and early‐spring. Species such as Hipposideros armiger (20.14 ± 1.60°C in spring and 17.97 ± 0.88°C in mid‐winter), Rhinolophus affinis (19.98 ± 1.76°C in spring and 16.18 ± 3.09°C in mid‐winter) and Rhinolophus cf. pusillus (19.55 ± 1.64°C in spring and 15.43 ± 2.87°C in mid‐winter) preferred warmer microclimates within caves during early‐spring compared to mid‐winter. The season‐ and species‐specific cave use that we report here suggests that even minor fluctuations in cave temperatures could potentially alter the composition of bat communities inside caves. Prioritization assessment based on a bat cave vulnerability index indicates that different caves must be protected based on their specific usage patterns and the abundance of species they support at various times. Overall, we highlight the importance of studying cave‐dwelling bats in climate‐vulnerable areas such as the Himalayas where species richness is high to help understand and predict the responses of animals to climate change.

Understanding mechanisms underlying coexistence among potential competitors, and between predators and prey, is a persistent challenge in community ecology. Using 6 years (2013–2018) of camera‐trapping data and species interaction models, we investigated the spatiotemporal patterns of inter‐ and intra‐guild interspecific interactions in a diverse terrestrial mammalian community in Pakke Wildlife Sanctuary and Tiger Reserve (PTR), Northeast India. We found no evidence of spatial interaction among apex predators (tiger Panthera tigris, leopard Panthera pardus, and dhole Cuon alpinus). However, dholes temporally separated themselves from tigers and leopards. Among small carnivores, marbled cat (Pardofelis marmorata) and leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) exhibited temporal separation, whereas leopard cat overlapped spatially and temporally with other small carnivores. Herbivores exhibited neither spatial nor temporal separation with each other. All apex predators exhibited diel activity and space‐use patterns to overlap with their preferred prey. Our results suggest that the assembly of the diverse mammalian community of PTR is a complex process, and coexistence among potential competitors, and predators and prey is likely facilitated by several mechanisms including spatial and temporal segregation, and potentially dietary separation.

Conservation plans that explicitly account for the social landscape where people and wildlife co‐occur can yield more effective and equitable conservation practices and outcomes. Yet, social data remain underutilized, often because social data are treated as aspatial or are analyzed with approaches that do not quantify uncertainty or address bias in self‐reported data. We conducted a survey (questionnaires) of 177 households in a multiuse landscape in the Kenya–Tanzania borderlands. In a mixed‐methods approach, we used Bayesian hierarchical models to quantify and map local attitudes toward African elephant ( Loxodonta africana ) conservation while accounting for response bias and then combined inference from attitude models with thematic analysis of open‐ended responses and cointerpretation of results with local communities to gain deeper understanding of what explains attitudes of people living with wildlife. Model estimates showed that believing elephants have sociocultural value increased the probability of respondents holding positive attitudes toward elephant conservation in general (mean increase = 0.31 [95% credible interval, CrI, 0.02–0.67]), but experiencing negative impacts from any wildlife species lowered the probability of respondents holding a positive attitude toward local elephant conservation (mean decrease = −0.20 [95% CrI −0.42 to 0.03]). Qualitative data revealed that safety and well‐being concerns related to the perceived threats that elephants pose to human lives and livelihoods, and limited incentives to support conservation on community and private lands lowered positive local attitude probabilities and contributed to negative perceptions of human–elephant coexistence. Our spatially explicit modeling approach revealed fine‐scale variation in drivers of conservation attitudes that can inform targeted conservation planning. Our results suggest that approaches focused on sustaining existing sociocultural values and relationships with wildlife, investing in well‐being, and implementing species‐agnostic approaches to wildlife impact mitigation could improve conservation outcomes in shared landscapes.

Balancing the competing, and often conflicting, needs of people and wildlife in shared landscapes is a major challenge for conservation science and policy worldwide. Connectivity is critical for wildlife persistence, but dispersing animals may come into conflict with people, leading to severe costs for humans and animals and impeding connectivity. Thus, conflict mitigation and connectivity present an apparent dilemma for conservation. We present a framework to address this dilemma and disentangle the effects of barriers to animal movement and conflict-induced mortality of dispersers on connectivity. We extend random-walk theory to map the connectivity–conflict interface, or areas where frequent animal movement may lead to conflict and conflict in turn impedes connectivity. We illustrate this framework with the endangered Asian elephantElephas maximus, a species that frequently disperses out of protected areas and comes into conflict with humans. We mapped expected movement across a human-dominated landscape over the short- and long-term, accounting for conflict mortality. Natural and conflict-induced mortality together reduced expected movement and connectivity among populations. Based on model validation, our conflict predictions that explicitly captured animal movement better explained observed conflict than a model that considered distribution alone. Our work highlights the interaction between connectivity and conflict and enables identification of location-specific conflict mitigation strategies that minimize losses to people, while ensuring critical wildlife movement between habitats. By predicting where animal movement and humans collide, we provide a basis to plan for broad-scale conservation and the mutual well-being of wildlife and people in shared landscapes.