Home Range and Habitat Use of Breeding Black-Necked Cranes

Animals

Bin Wang¹  Jianghong Ran²  Chenhao Zhao²  Xingcheng He²  Yuyi Jin²  Yongjie Wu²  Wei Liu² 

[1] Institute of Ecology, China West Normal University, Nanchong 637002, China;Sichuan Key Laboratory of Conservation Biology on Endangered Wildlife, College of Life Sciences, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610064, China;

关键词: home range;    habitat utilization;    grazing activity;    Grus nigricollis;    marsh;   

DOI  :  10.3390/ani10111975

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

To effectively protect a species, understanding its habitat needs and threats across its life-history stages is necessary. The black-necked crane (Grus nigricollis) is an endangered wetland bird species of the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau, which is an important grazing area in China. To overcome the conflict between increasing grazing activities and the protection of wild cranes, we investigated the variation of habitat utilization within the home range of cranes at different stages (preincubation, incubation, postfledging, and fully fledged stages). We manually tracked 13 pairs of cranes in the Zoige international wetland, used the fixed-kernel-polygon (FKP) method to determine home-range size, and used satellite images to identify different habitat types. The average home-range size was 143.38 ± 34.46 ha. Cranes were most often located in meadow habitats followed by marsh meadows and marshes. During the postfledging stage, home-range size was significantly decreased, with the proportion of marsh habitat slightly increased. Since this stage is crucial for young-crane survival, research on the importance of marshes and effective protection measures should be further strengthened.

【 授权许可】

Unknown