Factors affecting crop field use by Blackbuck in Krishnasaar Conservation Area, Nepal.

Abstract Reducing crop damage caused by wildlife in forest-agricultural land interface requires an understanding of the spatial pattern of crop field use and its drivers. We assessed factors influencing the spatial pattern of crop-field use by a generalist wild herbivore, blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra), in the agriculture-dominated landscape of Krishnasaar Conservation Area (KrCA) in low land Nepal. We systematically selected 103 crop fields distributed over the entire KrCA (within both core area and community development zone) and surveyed them three times over three months, resulting in 309 sampling occasions. We found that crop use by blackbuck was highly localized inside core area (only 15% of the sampled crop fields were used) even though crop fields outside the core area were accessible and had limited mitigation measures applied. The linear mixed effect modeling showed that probability of crop field use by blackbuck increased with size of the crop field, implying the magnitude of foraging benefits affects blackbuck crop-use decisions. The presence of current mitigation measures (e.g., scare crow, vegetative fencing) did not have discernible influence on probability of crop field use, so did the types of the crops, and distance of crop fields from the center of the core area. Overall, our results suggest that generalist herbivore, blackbuck, employs low gain-low risk strategy when using crop fields in natural habitat-agricultural. Minimizing current level of crop damage by blackbuck will require working closely with farmers who owns lands close to the natural habitat (core area) to apply appropriate mitigation measures.