Ranjana Pal

Wildlife and Wildland Conservation Lab BYU

India has a rich natural history record from the Himalaya spanning over a century. In this chapter, we provide an overview of existing knowledge on snow leopard, especially from the more recent studies. A knowledge gap analysis in 2016 had revealed that barely 4% of its range was well studied, although snow leopards occur pervasively across ca. 100...

The coexistence of species with similar ecological niches implies that species must segregate along one or more niche axes in order to avoid competition. Partitioning of time, space, or resources is an essential niche dimension along which competitor species tend to coexist. The intensity of interspecific competition may vary under varying anthropo...

Background Large-scale changes in habitat conditions due to human modifications and climate change require management practices to consider how species communities can alter amidst these changes. Understanding species interactions across the gradient of space, anthropogenic pressure, and season provide the opportunity to anticipate possible dynamic...

Background: Populations exhibit signatures of local adaptive traits due to spatial and environmental heterogeneity resulting in microevolution. The blue sheep is widely distributed across the high Asian mountains and are the snow leopard’s principal prey species. These mountains differ in their evolutionary history due to differential glaciation an...

The woolly wolf Canis lupus chanco is increasingly being accepted as a unique taxon that needs immediate protection and management; however, information on its ecology remains limited across its range. We used camera trapping data set of 4 years (2015–2019) to investigate seasonal activity patterns and space use and assessed woolly wolf food habits...

The Eurasian Otter Lutra lutra is an elusive, solitary animal that has one of the widest distributions of all palearctic mammals. Once widely distributed in Asia, the Eurasian Otter population is now vulnerable to urbanization, pollution, poaching, and dam construction. Eurasian Otter distribution in the Indian Himalayan rivers is little explored,...

Human modification and habitat fragmentation significantly impact large carnivores requiring large, connected habitats to persist in a landscape. Understanding species responses to such change and the protection of critical areas and connectivity they provide is essential when planning effective conservation strategies. Our study examines the spati...

Throughout the Himalaya, mountain ungulates are threatened by hunting for meat and body parts, habitat loss, and competition with livestock. Accurate population estimates are important for conservation management but most of the available methods to estimate ungulate densities are difficult to implement in mountainous terrain. Here, we tested the e...

Understanding the distribution of wildlife species and their response to diverse anthropogenic pressures is important for conservation planning and management of wildlife space in human-dominated landscapes. Assessments of anthropogenic impacts on mammals of the Indian Himalayan Region have mostly been limited to locations inside protected areas. W...

Of the sub-species of Holarctic wolf, the Woolly wolf (Canis lupus chanco) is uniquely adapted to atmospheric hypoxia and widely distributed across the Himalaya, Qinghai Tibetan Plateau (QTP) and Mongolia. Taxonomic ambiguity still exists for this sub-species because of complex evolutionary history anduse of limited wild samples across its range in...

An understanding of the heterogeneity, or nonrandomness, in the distribution of species on Earth is one of the central goals in the ecological sciences and constitutes the collective science of Biogeography. This multidisciplinary branch of science incorporates elements from widely disparate disciplines such as biology, ecology, geography, remote s...

The woolly flying squirrel ( Eupetaurus cinereus Thomas, 1888) is one of the least-known endangered mammals of the Himalayas and recorded only from few localities at 2400–3600 m in Hindu Kush and North-Western Himalayas. We report first confirmed record of this species from Upper Bhagirathi Basin, Uttarakhand, Western Himalaya. The squirrel was pho...

Camera trap photographs of solitary individuals of Asiatic wild dog or dholes (Cuon alpinus, Pallas 1811) have been recorded from Kheda Tal area in Uttarkashi district of Uttarakhand. This is the first photographic confirmation of the presence of this species in the Himalayan habitats of Uttarakhand. The presence of dholes here seems to be confined...

In human-populated landscapes worldwide, domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) are the most abundant terrestrial carnivore. Although dogs have been used for the protection of livestock from wild carnivores, they have also been implicated as predators of livestock. We used a combination of methods (field surveys, interview surveys, and data from se...

There is an increasing demand for scientific information on the state of environment particularly biodiversity in different regions of the world. While information is scanty for poorly studied regions, there is substantial information for some regions but most of it is not readily available as either it is widely scattered or largely unpublished. I...

We assessed the distribution and broad-scale resource utilization patterns of mountain ungulates in Bhagirath basin (ranging from 500m to 5000m) of Uttarakhand, India. . A total of eight ungulates species were captured (1197 photographs) in 10,167 trap nights effort. Barking deer Muntiacus vaginalis (11.27 ±3.79) was the most photo-captured (#/100...

The year 2010 marked the shifting of the University campus from Kashmere Gate to Dwarka. From the hustle-bustle and crowded streets of Old Delhi, it occupied to a more peaceful and greener settings. The presence of plantation sites, agricultural areas and water bodies in the vicinity along with the green belt of the campus has proved to be a great...