3.4. Distribution-wide assessment of dhole pack size:
We used average dhole pack size as the response variable and tiger
density, ungulate density, area of PA, terrain ruggedness as predictor
variables. We scaled predictor variables (Size of PA, elevational
heterogeneity and terrain ruggedness) and checked for correlation among
all predictor variables. We dropped elevational heterogeneity as the
predictor variables because of its high correlation with terrain
ruggedness. We ran a total of 10 additive and interactive models (Table
2, Figure 3). The top two models achieved the model selection criterion
of ΔAICc <2. Upon model selection we found, additive effect of
tiger density and prey density and interactive effect of tiger density
and prey density, to be the top two best models (Table 3, Figure 4 &
5). On averaging the two top models (Table 4, Figure 6) we found a
negative association of tiger density (-0.89 ± 0.33, p = 0.01) and a
positive association of prey density (0.09 ± 0.03, p =0.03) with the
pack size and prey*tiger density (0.01 ± 0.0, p =0.18) was not
significant but still explained the relation with the response variable.