Published in

MDPI, Animals, 11(10), p. 1975, 2020

DOI: 10.3390/ani10111975

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Home Range and Habitat Use of Breeding Black-necked Cranes

Journal article published in 2020 by Wei Liu, Yuyi Jin, Yongjie Wu ORCID, Chenhao Zhao, Xingcheng He, Bin Wang, Jianghong Ran
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

To effectively protect a species, understanding its habitat needs and threats across its life-history stages is necessary. The Black-necked Crane (Grus nigricollis) is an endangered wetland bird species of the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau, which is an important grazing area in China. To overcome the conflict between increasing grazing activities and the protection of wild cranes, we investigated the variation of habitat utilization within the home range of cranes at different stages (preincubation, incubation, postfledging, and fully fledged stages). We manually tracked 13 pairs of cranes in the Zoige international wetland, used the fixed-kernel-polygon (FKP) method to determine home-range size, and used satellite images to identify different habitat types. The average home-range size was 143.38 ± 34.46 ha. Cranes were most often located in meadow habitats followed by marsh meadows and marshes. During the postfledging stage, home-range size was significantly decreased, with the proportion of marsh habitat slightly increased. Since this stage is crucial for young-crane survival, research on the importance of marshes and effective protection measures should be further strengthened.