Balancing biodiversity conservation and rural food security is a pressing challenge for developing countries, with tropical agro-grasslands facing particularly high human dependence and species' endangerment. We explored the potential influences of agricultural growth and allocation of multiple landuses on the status of two threatened species inhabiting semiarid agro-grasslands of India. Sampling 1 km**2 cells for flagship lesser florican Sypheotides indica and 0.03 ha plots for spiny-tailed lizard Saara hardwickii, we modeled species' abundances with land-cover, vegetation structure, and disturbances using N-mixture (florican) and poisson (lizard) models. Florican abundance responded unimodally to herbaceous biomass (grassland proportion × ground-vegetation height), wherein, numbers peaked at optimally large combinations of grassland proportion (0.5–1) and ground-vegetation height (35–65 cm). Whereas, lizard abundance was positively influenced by grassland occurrence and ground-vegetation 30%) and lizard (>20%) populations. To prevent this, remaining florican occupied agro-grasslands should be secured as Community/Conservation reserves so that further landuse conversions can be legally restricted. Simultaneously, government schemes like food provisioning to small farmers through public distribution system could be harnessed to compensate for production deficit within/adjoining reserves.
Data sets on abundance and habitat covariates of lesser florican and spiny-tailed lizard in Abdasa grasslands (Kachchh, India), collected during 2008-09. It comprises of two spreadsheets: 1. Florican data at 1 sqkm resolution - data headers include: a. Cell identity (GRID) b. Count of floricans in first visit (Count_1) and second visit (Count_2) c. Transect efforts (km) for first visit (Effort_1) and second visit (Effort_2) d. Weather recorded as '1' if cloudy-rainy, otherwise '0' in first visit (Weather_1) and second visit (Weather_2) e. Time of survey recorded as '1' if early morning, otherwise '0' in the first visit (Time_1) and second visit (Time_2) f. Autologistic term calculated as distance-weighted sum of florican occurrences in eight adjacent cells (AUTO) g. Grassland proportion (G/GA) 0-1 h. Herbaceous height (GHT) scaled from 0-1 h. Scrub recorded as '1' if proportional-cover >0.4, otherwise '0' (SCL) i. Residuals of remoteness from human artifacts (REM) j. Herbaceous biomass calculated as G/GA * GHT (GVOL) -----------------------------2. Lizard data at 0.03ha resolution (also in text format available at 'Download data')a. Cell identity (GRID) b. Longitude (LONG) and Latitude (LAT) in degree-decimals c. Count of Spiny-tailed lizard burrows (stl_num) d. Grassland-proportion (grl) 0-1 e. Cropland-proportion (crl) 0-1 f. Ground-vegetation <50cm proportional cover (veg<50) 0-1 g. Shrub-height in ordinal scale (sht) 0-4 h. Grass palatability (pal) i. Distance to settlement in km (dvil) j. Grazing pressure measured as composite index (grz)
Supplement to: Dutta, Sutirtha; Jhala, Yadvendradev (2014): Planning agriculture based on landuse responses of threatened semiarid grassland species in India. Biological Conservation, 175, 129-139
