Forums | HES 健康与环境科学

22 September 2023, 11:15 AM

Speaker: Jiahuan Niu

Date: 2023-09-27

Time: 14:00-14:30 pm

Room: ES354

Online link:

https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/cHLE02oBtSPP

Meeting ID: 664-4757-0489

Title: Does eradication can suppress plateau zokor populations, or lead to an opposite effect in a short time?

Abstract: Plateau zokor is one of the soil-dwelling rodents in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, being regarded as a pest because of its mound-building and belowground foraging activities. From the 1960s, local people started to use poisons or arrow traps to reduce the zokor population in alpine grassland. However, we lack the change of population density and the population growth rate after the killing in a short time. In this research, we want to evaluate if the current zokor eradication campaign can suppress the zokor population, or, if it will lead to a zokor population explosion. In May 2021, Henan local government (Qinghai Province, China) held their annual rodent control campaign. We established control areas (N = 10) with no eradication, and eradicated areas (N= 70), each an area of 90m by 90m square, distributed along 2 roads. We collected drone images of zokor mounds in the following 2 years to analyze the change of relative population densities.