Honors Theses and Capstones

Date of Award

Spring 2017

Project Type

Senior Honors Thesis

College or School

COLSA

Department

Biological Sciences

Program or Major

Biomedical Science: Medical and Veterinary Sciences

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

First Advisor

Drew Conroy

Second Advisor

Laurie Marker

Abstract

Fewer then 10,000 cheetahs remain in Sub-Saharan Africa. Namibia has the largest population, estimated to be 4,000. Habitat fragmentation and prey depletion from human expansion for agriculture has pushed 90% of cheetahs to reside on commercial farmland where there is an absence of larger predators. Radio telemetry was used to investigate the seasonal variation in home range size among nine female cheetahs on commercial farmlands on or near the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Otjiwarongo, Namibia. ArcGIS 10.3 and Geospatial Modeling Environment were used to calculate the overall and core home range size. This was estimated for the overall, annual, monthly, and seasonal variants for each cheetah. Nine female cheetahs were tracked in this study, 6 were rewilded and 3 were wild. The average GPS locations collected for the rewilded cheetahs was 4,165.5 and the average collected for the wild cheetahs was 1,219.3. The average number of months the cheetahs were tracked under GPS radio telemetry was 10.2 months and the average age of the cheetahs was 64.2 months. The wild cheetahs had a larger home range estimation compared to the rewilded cheetahs with an average 95% and 50% kernel of 1,738.7 km2 and 302.7 km2. The home range size and average distance moved (km) between GPS locations had no significance between the seasons based on analysis using the Kruskal Wallis and post-hoc test (R 3.2.1). These results can help formulate a long term conservation plan for the remaining and rewilded cheetah population on Namibia's commercial farmland.

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