We quantified four key influential variables that could potentially
affect snow leopard habitat use. These included population
size of large and small bodied livestock, determined using door
to door census at all the sites. This involved censuses in 51 villages
across the ten sites. The abundance of wild ungulate prey, blue
sheep Pseudois nayaur and ibex Capra sibirica, was estimated in
each site twice, using the capture–recapture based double observer
survey technique (Suryawanshi et al., 2012) and the average of the
two estimates was used for analysis. Livestock stocking densities
and wild prey densities for all ten sites were calculated by dividing
their respective abundance estimates by the area of each site.
Human population size was included as an indicator of anthropogenic
activities (Harihar and Pandav, 2012; Woodroffe, 2000).
Anthropogenic activities can influence activity patterns of carnivores,
with carnivores avoiding high human activity periods
(Carter et al., 2015). Human population was derived from Census
of India data (http://censusindia.gov.in/).