新疆卡拉麦里山有蹄类自然保护区冬季狼的家域

正狼(Canis lupus)是食肉目(Carnivora)、犬科(Canidae)、犬属(Canis)食肉类哺乳动物(盛和林等,1999),是世界上分布最广和研究最多的大型食肉动物(Ripple et al.,2014)。目前,我国狼的分布已由过去的全国性分布缩小至东北、西北和内蒙等地区(Zhang,1999)。在斯洛伐克,研究人员通过无线电项圈获取分布在两个国家公园内两群狼的家域利用情况(Findo and Chovancova,2004),加

The largest gray wolf (Canis lupus) home ranges in the world may exist in the Mount Kalamaili Ungulate Nature Reserve,Xinjiang, China

Understanding wildlife movement and space use is essential for designing effective conservation management strategies. Many top predators, such as wolves (Canis lupus), are elusive and difficult to study. We captured and placed GPS collars on free-ranging male and female grey wolves Canis lupus in the Mount Kalamaili Ungulate Nature Reserve in January and November 2014. We recorded 513 active locations for the adult male and 870 locations for the adult female. Minimum Convex Polygon (MCP) estimated home range sizes of 1947km2 and 3728km2 for the male and female wolf, respectively. On a global scale these preliminary results suggest that wolves persisting in Mount Kalamaili Ungulate Nature Reserve may have the largest home range sizes of any wolf population in the world. Locally, it may demonstrate the need for large-scale management of this key protected landscape as both male and female wolves require vast areas to survive. Further research is urgently required to expand the sample size of collared wolves to increase confidence in home range estimates and to examine any ecological or human-induced effects on habitat selection for this important population of wolves.