As human population and consequent ecological impact continue to grow, certain wildlife species are increasingly utilizing anthropogenic food sources to sustain and even increase their population sizes. One example is large carnivores, which are known to develop synanthropic behavior and rely on livestock, garbage, and other anthropogenic resources. To examine this phenomenon, we conducted a multi-year camera trap study in Sarıkamış-Allahuekber Mountains National Park and surrounding forest in eastern Turkey to document presence and estimate species-specific single-season occupancy for medium-large mammals in a geographically isolated and heavily degraded forest. Preliminary camera trap efforts began in 2006 with opportunistic sampling. During 2013-2016 we used a 2 km2 sampling grid to sample approximately 326 km2 of forested area dominated by Scots pine. Camera traps were deployed for a minimum of 45 consecutive days each year during four summer/fall field seasons.
Results/Conclusions
We obtained more than 50,000 images and detected 14 species of wild mammals during a total sampling effort of 12,731 camera trap days. Human activity was the most common event captured by cameras and was an order of magnitude more common than that of all other species. Gray wolves and Eurasian brown bears were the most frequent wildlife events. Species-specific single season modeled occupancy estimates ranged across years (2013-2016) from 0.772 - 0.856 for bears, 0.53 - 0.922 for wolves, and 0.372 - 1 for lynx. Natural prey species were rarely captured, implying that these species may be functionally extinct as a natural prey base. Wild boar was the only natural prey species with sufficient data for occupancy modeling, with a range of 0.466 - 0.646 across years. Human activity was ubiquitous across the landscape, with human occupancy estimates ranging from 0.835 - 1 and livestock occupancy ranging from 0.395 - 0.498 across years. Our results suggest that in human-dominated landscapes, the combination of the scarcity of natural prey and the presence of synanthropic carnivores can result in an alternative stable state of an ecosystem in which carnivores increase in abundance while wildlife habitat quality continues to degrade.