Hierarchical Habitat Selection of Endangered Hispid Hare and Implications for Its Conservation Management

Many endangered species are specialists of threatened habitats with poorly understood species-habitat relationships. Hence, knowledge of their habitat selection becomes vital for effective conservation management. We investigated habitat selection of the endangered hispid hare Caprolagus hispidus using a hierarchical multiscale analysis, from geographical range to microsites. We conducted surveys in eight protected areas (PAs) covering the entire Terai region along the foothills of Indian Himalayas. We examined the effects of climatic, landscape, topographic, and anthropogenic variables on the species' occurrence using ensemble presence-only models at range level and generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) at population and microsite levels. We examined the effects of the above variables alongside grass-species assemblage, height, and cover on hare habitat use at microsite level using GLMM. We found that hispid hare distribution is highly fragmented and restricted to tall successional grasslands within the PAs. At the range level, the percentage of tall grassland cover, fire intensity, distance from a PA, and mean temperature influenced hare occurrence. At the population level, habitat selection was scale-dependent: occurrence probability responded unimodally to fire intensity at a broad scale (700 m), positively to the percentage of tall grassland cover and negatively to human footprint at finer scales (100 m). At the micro-sites, the species selected tall grass-species assemblages dominated by Narenga porphyrocoma (syn: Saccharum narenga). Our findings on the species-habitat relationships for the hispid hare emphasize the need for rotational (instead of complete) burning, eradication of invasive weeds, and regulation of cattle grazing for the restoration of the remaining habitats of hispid hare, totalling similar to 300 sq.km area. Finally, (trans)national policies on hydroelectric projects, which shape riverine grassland communities, need to accommodate the conservation needs of grassland obligatory fauna, including the endangered hispid hare.