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8 December 2020 Diet Overlap Between Livestock and Wild Herbivores in the Greater Himalaya
Lisa Jeanne Koetke, Tapajit Bhattacharya, Sambandam Sathyakumar
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Abstract

Understanding the niche usage and dietary habits of wild ungulate populations is crucial to monitoring their response to livestock grazing and changes in habitat quality. Livestock grazing is common throughout the Himalaya and may reduce available forage for wild ungulates, but few studies have assessed the impact of livestock grazing on the diets of wild herbivores in the Greater Himalaya. We assessed forage availability and used microhistological analysis to compare the diet composition of livestock (domestic goats and sheep) and 2 wild herbivores (blue sheep Pseudois nayaur and musk deer Moschus sp.) in the Uttarkashi district of Uttarakhand, India. We calculated the diet preference and niche breadth of each species and the diet overlap between each pair of species. Our results suggest that musk deer may browse trees more than previously understood. In addition, blue sheep consumed fewer graminoids in the autumn than has been previously published. The seasonal increase in shrub and herb consumption by blue sheep during the winter may be amplified and shifted to earlier in the year as a result of reduced graminoid availability after intensive livestock grazing. We recommend monitoring livestock numbers in the study area and limiting livestock to current numbers to avoid further reducing forage availability.

© 2020 Koetke et al. This open access article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Please credit the authors and the full source.
Lisa Jeanne Koetke, Tapajit Bhattacharya, and Sambandam Sathyakumar "Diet Overlap Between Livestock and Wild Herbivores in the Greater Himalaya," Mountain Research and Development 40(1), R21-R27, (8 December 2020). https://doi.org/10.1659/MRD-JOURNAL-D-19-00016.1
Received: 1 December 2019; Accepted: 1 April 2020; Published: 8 December 2020
KEYWORDS
diet niche
forage availability
livestock
microhistology
Moschus sp.
Pseudois nayaur
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