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Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9222-5404

AccessType

Open Access Dissertation

Document Type

dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Program

Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Year Degree Awarded

2021

Month Degree Awarded

September

First Advisor

Toni Lyn Morelli

Subject Categories

Animal Studies | Applied Mathematics | Applied Statistics | Biodiversity | Bioinformatics | Biology | Biostatistics | Data Science | Desert Ecology | Design of Experiments and Sample Surveys | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Environmental Health | Environmental Health and Protection | Environmental Monitoring | Environmental Sciences | Forest Sciences | Geographic Information Sciences | Geography | Multivariate Analysis | Natural Resources and Conservation | Nature and Society Relations | Physical and Environmental Geography | Research Methods in Life Sciences | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Statistical Methodology | Statistical Models | Statistics and Probability | Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology | Zoology

Abstract

Carnivores are distributed widely and threatened by habitat loss, poaching, climate change, and disease. They are considered integral to ecosystem function through their direct and indirect interactions with species at different trophic levels. Given the importance of carnivores, it is of high conservation priority to understand the processes driving carnivore assemblages in different systems. It is thus essential to determine the abiotic and biotic drivers of carnivore community composition at different spatial scales and address the following questions: (i) What factors influence carnivore community composition and diversity? (ii) How do the factors influencing carnivore communities vary across spatial and temporal scales? (iii) At local scales, what are the roles of within- and between- guild interactions in structuring carnivore communities? I use carnivore distribution data from protected areas across the global tropics to understand how multiple biodiversity metrics track one another at the regional scale. At the landscape scale, I apply carnivore community data from India to understand how spatiotemporal interactions at the local scale influence carnivore distribution patterns at larger scales. Lastly, at the local scale, I implement a field study of carnivore community occupancy at Kasanka National Park in Zambia using camera traps to understand spatiotemporal patterns of distribution. I employ these studies to delineate the importance of scale in developing a theoretical and applied understanding of community ecology, monitoring mammals at the community level, and conserving carnivore communities. This research shows that carnivore conservation and biodiversity monitoring at the community level is both context-specific and scale dependent.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/24247078

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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