Habitat Assessment & Corridor Evaluation
More than 85% of the sloth bear population occurs in India in highly degraded and fragmented habitat and which leads to human-sloth bear conflict. While protected sloth bear habitats are studied well, sloth bear ranges in non-protected areas have dearth of information and research. Sloth bear is not a media darling and because most of the attention is taken by the charismatic mammals like lion, tiger, elephant and rhino in India. The present research aims to study habitat quality, movement of sloth bear and human-sloth bear conflicts in non-protected areas of western India. It is felt that the findings of this research would lighten up the status of sloth bear and its habitat and helpful in formulating conservation and management strategies focusing on sloth bear conservation and mitigating human-bear conflicts.
Sign survey
The entire sloth bear landscape is divided into 4x4km grids and each grid is surveyed to determine the presence or absence of sloth bears. Strip transects as well as opportunistic survey methods are used during which sloth bear signs such as scats, pugmarks, claw marks on the trees, digging etc are collected.
Camera trapping
Camera trapping is employed for multi-evidence survey in the study area. The camera trap pictures are used to double-check the presence and movement of Sloth bear within the grids. Cameras are deployed at the centroid of 1x1 km grid as well as at the areas with the high frequency of the occurrence of the animals based on the sign surveys.