Tracking data from a free-roaming female cheetah released into the Pilanesberg National Park, South Africa

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 1,190 records.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

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How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Power J, Page-Nicholson S, van der Merwe V, Dell S, Roxburgh L (2019): Tracking data from a free-roaming female cheetah released into the Pilanesberg National Park, South Africa. v1.1. North West Parks Board and Endangered Wildlife Trust. Dataset/Occurrence. http://ipt.sanbi.org.za/iptsanbi/resource?r=pilanesbergcheetah&v=1.0

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is Endangered Wildlife Trust. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: d45cd682-b4a0-4118-bfc8-eea3fb752aff.  Endangered Wildlife Trust publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by South African Biodiversity Information Facility.

Keywords

Occurrence; cheetah; tracking; free-roaming

Contacts

Geographic Coverage

Pilanesberg National Park, South Africa

Taxonomic Coverage

No Description available

Temporal Coverage

Project Data

In 2011, South Africa’s cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) metapopulation began with the capture of free-roaming cheetahs on ranchland to populate a network of fenced game reserves. This practice has become increasingly disparaged as the wild population faces population decline due to numerous anthropogenic threats. However, occasionally, there are extenuating circumstances where free-roaming animals are captured from this population to augment the managed metapopulation. One particular female cheetah that was captured on ranchland in the North West Province in April 2014, where she was perceived to be at risk from persecution, was released onto Pilanesberg National Park She was monitored via satellite telemetry for a period of 10 months, and interventions took place during this period to ensure her survival. This female bred successfully, and established a home-range of ~317 km² (100 % MCP), which was half that of the free-roaming cheetahs outside of Pilanesberg, and may be related to differences in anthropogenic disturbances. During the denning period she moved less, and covered only 2 % of her normal ranging area, while as expected she also travelled less during the night time. Satellite location data of ~11 months, including four locations per day, is availed for users interested in movement, home-range and resource use data.

The personnel involved in the project:

Sampling Methods

A female cheetah was immobilised using standard procedures. She was fitted with a satellite collar (Iridium GPS unit, 1 D cell AWT transmitter, 1 C cell, African Wildlife Tracking cc, 106 Nuffield Street, Rietondale, Pretoria, South Africa), that would obtain 4 location fixes per day. The download times were at the following evenly spaced times throughout the diel cycle: 00:00, 06:00, 12:00 and 18:00. The recorded data was the geographic coordinates, altitude and temperature. The collar stopped at the end of the period, while the telemetry component lasted till the end of the year in 2015, and this animal is still alive, but we have not removed her collar as yet.

Method step description:

1. It is possible that the first day’s locations upon release would be at different times to that specified, which is the case when a specific schedule is selected, so such can be excluded. The fixes obtained are mostly within a 10 m accuracy.

Additional Metadata