Sampita Sarkar’s research while affiliated with Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata and other places

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Publications (2)


Scavengers in the human-dominated landscape: an experimental study
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July 2024

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78 Reads

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2 Citations

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Rapid urbanization is a major cause of habitat and biodiversity loss and human–animal conflict. While urbanization is inevitable, we need to develop a good understanding of the urban ecosystem and the urban-adapted species, in order to ensure sustainable cities for our future. Scavengers play a major role in urban ecosystems, and often, urban adaptation involves a shift towards scavenging behaviour in wild animals. We experimented at different sites in the state of West Bengal, India, to identify the scavenging guild within urban habitats, in response to human-provided food. Our study found a total of 17 different vertebrate species across 15 sites, over 498 sessions of observations. We carried out network analysis to understand the dynamics of the system and found that the free-ranging dog and common myna were key species within the scavenging networks. This study revealed the complexity of scavenging networks within human-dominated habitats. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Connected interactions: enriching food web research by spatial and social interactions’.

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Figure 1: A box and whiskers plot showing the effect of dog response order on the session diversity. FR -First responder, SR -Second responder and TR -Third responder, RR -Rest of the positions of Responder; NR -No responder. The black line represents the median value, the open diamond marks the mean, the rectangle shows the 25 th and 75 th quartile of the data and the whiskers represent the data range.
Figure 5. a) The relationship between normalized degree (ND) and betweenness centrality (BC) of scavenger species; b) The relationship between normalized degree (ND) and closeness centrality (CC) of scavenger species.
Figure 6: The bipartite graph represents the VF network structure of scavengers in response to human generated food source in different sites of West Bengal. Each upper rectangle represents a scavenger species and lower rectangle represents a site. The size of the rectangle reflects the no of times a species appears in the network as responder. The line match scavenger species responding a specific site, and the width of the line shows the number of individuals responding that specific site.
Figure S1: Map of study sites. The figure shows the various sites in which sampling was carried within the state of West Bengal, India.
Figure S3: Response pattern of scavengers in study sites. This figure shows the no of scavengers found across different study sites. a) Depicts the scavengers found in both VF and VNF combined in the study sites; b) shows the scavengers found only in VF and c) shows the scavengers responded in NVF. The color intensity (black-grey) of the heatmap, figures (a-c) represent the dominance of species response high to low.

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Scavengers in the human-dominated landscape: an experimental study

August 2022

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656 Reads

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1 Citation

Rapid urbanization is a major cause of habitat and biodiversity loss and human-animal conflict. While urbanization is inevitable, we need to develop a good understanding of the urban ecosystem and the urban-adapted species in order to ensure sustainable cities for our future. Scavengers play a major role in urban ecosystems, and often, urban adaptation involves a shift towards scavenging behaviour in wild animals. We carried out an experiment at different sites in the state of West Bengal, India, to identify the scavenging guild within urban habitats, in response to human provided food. Our study revealed a total of 17 different vertebrate species were identified across sites over 498 sessions of observations. We carried out network analysis to understand the dynamics of the system, and found that the free-ranging dog and common mynah were key species within the scavenging networks. This study revealed the complexity of scavenging networks within human-dominated habitats.

Citations (1)


... A key question in this framework is how the complex dynamics of multiple interactions determine the response of ecosystems to management and human interventions. This theme issue includes the studies by Kushal & Springborn, Bodini et al., Ortiz & Hermosillo-Núñez and Biswas et al. [33,36,60,61], which explore the intricate relationships between human activities and natural systems, offering insights into sustainable management and policy design. ...

Reference:

Connected interactions: enriching food web research by spatial and social interactions
Scavengers in the human-dominated landscape: an experimental study