Replanting Banj oak trees and conservation of existing patches of the species which are sleeping and feeding sites of local langurs in the fragile high-altitude Garhwal Himalayas can help mitigate conflict between humans and the primates in the region, researchers have said.
In a first-of-its kind study, published in Global Ecology and Conservation journal, the researchers tried to investigate the reasons responsible for crop-foraging by any high-altitude langur species and suggest important steps for the mitigation of conflict over resources between the non-human primates and humans.
Oak is the dominant tree species found in the Himalayan zone and dependency of local communities on oak forests for livelihood is quite high and as these dense forests are in wane, Himalayan langur (HL) are being forced to raid the agricultural crops.
Langurs are leaf-eating primates, found along the Himalayas, ranging from north-western Pakistan, through Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand in the western Himalayas in India, to Nepal in the East.
The study noted that main food source of the langurs was oak during the fruiting season, but also that 22 per cent of their feeding time was spent on cultivated crops around harvest time.
To better frame a human-langur conflict-mitigation strategy for this particular landscape, lead author Himani Nautiyal from Kyoto University, Primate Research Institute, Inuyama, Japan said it was important to understand the peoples’ perception of langur crop-foraging and obtain a more detailed picture of langur habitat resource use by monitoring their feeding and sleeping site activity.
The study was conducted in the five villages of the Mandal valley, Chamoli district, Uttarakhand frequented by the langur troops.
The researchers found that villagers, who owned relatively more agricultural land and had good production throughout the whole year, had low interactions with langurs due to their low dependency on natural resources for their livestock.
However, farmers with relatively less agricultural land and low productivity depended significantly on livestock for extra income and thus relied more on the neighboring forest for grazing their cattle and collecting fodder for them.
“This high pressure on the surrounding forests is likely to have been a driver for langurs to forage more on agricultural crops in these areas at times of the year when natural food availability in the forest was low,” said the study.
Moreover, respondents who owned a relatively greater number of livestock, as compared to other households, perceived a reduction in the available resources in the nearby forests due to their intensified use of the nearby forest areas for livestock fodder.
Hence, the researchers suggested that this increased livestock-driven pressure on the forest compels wild herbivores to compete with livestock for food.
“This may also help explain the reportedly higher crop damage to households that had more cattle and had their perceptions of significant loss of resources in the village managed forests. “Agricultural land, annual crop production and livestock populations thus emerged to be the strongest predictors of crop damage by langurs in the Mandal valley,” they said.
The other researchers were VirendraMathur from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, Anindya Sinha from National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, Indiaand Michael A.Huffman, also from Kyoto University.