Fine Scale Habitat Selection in Travancore Tortoises (Indotestudo travancorica) in the Anamalai Hills, Western Ghats

Deepak, V and Noon, Barry R and Vasudevan, Karthikeyan (2016) Fine Scale Habitat Selection in Travancore Tortoises (Indotestudo travancorica) in the Anamalai Hills, Western Ghats. In: JOURNAL OF HERPETOLOGY, 50 (2). pp. 278-283.

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Abstract

Travancore Tortoises (Indotestudo travancorica) are endemic to the Western Ghats, south India. Landscape level surveys showed no clear habitat selection by the species. Therefore, we used radiotelemetry to study home-range size and fine-scale spatial movement habitat use of four tortoises from 2008-10. Minimum convex polygon home-range sizes of four tortoises varied between 5.2 and 34 ha. Tortoises spent a majority of their time in evergreen forest edge that had bamboo-lantana-grass. Eighty-two percent of the locations in the evergreen forest, and 95% of the locations in the bamboo-lantana-grass habitat, were at the edge of these habitats. Therefore at a fine scale, tortoises used the forest edge, possibly because it provided opportunities for foraging and thermoregulation.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	JOURNAL OF HERPETOLOGY
Publisher:	SOC STUDY AMPHIBIANS REPTILES
Additional Information:	Copy right for this article belongs to the SOC STUDY AMPHIBIANS REPTILES, C/O ROBERT D ALDRIDGE, ST LOUIS UNIV, DEPT BIOLOGY, 3507 LACLEDE, ST LOUIS, MO 63103 USA
Department/Centre:	Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences
Date Deposited:	25 Aug 2016 10:09
Last Modified:	25 Aug 2016 10:09
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/54333

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