3. RESULTS
Seven habitat types were found in SNP including forest and grasslands.
They are closed Shorea forest, open Shorea forest orShorea savana, riverine forest, short grassland, tall grassland,
grassland after fire and floodplain grassland. From the fecal counts
from the grid-based sampling during dry season, the Levin’s measure of
niche breadth or adaptability showed that spotted deer had the highest
adaptability with index value of 0.94 followed by domestic
cattle 0.50 , and swamp deer 0.33 in SNP (Table 1).
The co-occurrence of swamp deer and spotted deer was observed in69.5% of plots in which presence of swamp deer was recorded.
The co-occurrence of domestic cattle and spotted deer was detected in28.9% of plots in which presence of spotted deer was recorded
but the co-occurrence of domestic cattle and swamp deer was negligible.
During the dry season domestic cattle have high Morisita’s index of
overlap 0.83 with spotted deer. The spotted deer have moderate
overlap index value 0.57 with swamp deer whereas there is low
overlap index value of swamp deer with domestic cattle 0.23(Table 2).
Interaction of domestic cattle with wild species is very high in Sal
forest while there is no any interaction in tall grassland and grassland
after fire (Figure 2).