Abstract
Crop damage by wildlife is becoming a serious problem in Japan. We estimated the seasonal change of the habitat use, and the factor caused to crop damage for one troop of the crop-raiding Japanese macaques in Shibata City, Niigata Prefecture. The location data acquired by radio-tracking method from 2006 to 2008 were employed. Moreover, we applied ALOS/AVNIR-2 data for detecting the land-cover within macaque's habitat. At first, the seasonal change of habitat use by the Japanese macaques was evaluated using Manly's resource selection index. We also estimated the environmental factors which contributed to the occurrence of crop damage by generalized linear mixed model. As the results, habitat use by crop-raiding Japanese macaques was different by season. Japanese macaques preferred to the agricultural land during August to November. Japanese macaques were used the agricultural land as their foraging sites. Habitat use by Japanese macaques was related to the locations of the foraging sites. Especially, the dependence to the agricultural land becomes high level in the summer and winter which are the food scare seasons. The results of the generalized linear mixed model showed the difference among seasons in the environmental factors contributed to crop damage. The most important environmental factor which relate to crop damage was the minimum distance between the locations of crop damage and forest edge. As the other environmental variables which contributed to the prediction of crop damage, resources which are able to use in each season were selected (i.e., late spring: corn, other crops, and grass land, summer: corn and other crops, early winter: Kaki Persimmon). In conclusion, we propose to use the countermeasures properly in each season following the change of the environmental variables related to the occurrence of crop damage.
