Impact of agricultural activities on ecological habitat conservation in the rural environment- a case study of Prionailurus bengalensis in Taiwan

"Natural environment" and "resource conservation" are the key projects with the purpose of exploring the distribution and use of natural resources through the stability of the ecosystem. In order to make an approach to the interaction between land use and environmental changes, we aim to investigate the impact of human activities on natural resources through the existence of regional indicator species.

The persistence of regional species is an obvious indicator of local ecological changes. This research takes western Taiwan for example to study the Prionailurus bengalensis, commonly known as Leopard cat. Leopard cats, the endangered species in Taiwan, are at the top notch in the food-web structure, and their existence is significant for ecological stability and biodiversity. Previous studies have shown that the activity range of Leopard cats and human have an enormous overlap, to investigate the harmful factors affecting the survival of Leopard cats, the ecological stability and sustainability of the them was evaluated in the context of the distribution/residual of environmental agents applied during agricultural activities in this study. Information regarding the patterns of agricultural activities and their application locations in the study area shall be collected. Soil environment is sampled and the residual concentrations of environmental agents are determined.

The results show that land utilization pattern is the main cause of the organic substance and ions content in soil. The detected chemical agents such as Carbaryl, Tricyclazole, Butachlor, Chlorpyrifos were mainly concentrated in farmlands with high pesticide usage rate. The wide variety of chemical agents detected in Yuanli area indicated the considerably intensive agricultural activities in this arable land which resulted in declined sensitivity of the Leopard cats towards environment and meanwhile give rise to the occurrence of pesticide poisoned. This study employed the spatial information analysis technique in GIS to establish the relationship between distribution of Leopard cats and results of environmental sample detection. Factors that threaten the survival of them were further explored with an aim to find out the most direct correlation of environmental pollutions caused by economic growth and the existence of Leopard cats.