Techniques to estimate abundance and monitoring rodent pests in urban environments

CAVIA R.; CUETO G.R.; SUÁREZ O.V.

Integrated Pest Management and Pest Control

Intech

Lugar: Rijeka; Año: 2012; p. 147 - 172

This chapter addresses the problem of monitoring pest rodents in urban environments. Although there are many techniques that may be useful to estimate rodent abundance, most of them are difficult to be used in this type of environment. In general, the most used techniques to estimate rodent abundance are based on rodent trapping or on the registration of rodent signs. The problems of the estimation of rodent abundance in urban environments are: 1) methods based on trapping might represents a risk for people and pets because some traps may be harmful for them, 2) there are problems toaccess to some places like the interior of dwellings, shops and industries, and 3) there is the risk of the materials used to sample due to vandalism and theft (eg. traps can be stolen to be reused as traps, or sold when they are made of a valuable material). In this chapter we show experiences achieved under field conditions in different urban habitats of the city of Buenos Aires in order to evaluate the utility and feasibility of different direct and indirect techniques to sample rodents. Among the direct techniques, we include the use of live traps, kill traps and visual surveys. Among the indirect techniques we evaluate the use of burrow counts, non-toxic bait stations, gnawing in wood stakes and survey questions. We conclude that in urban environments the use of non-toxic bait stations is a useful and feasible technique to detect rodent abundance changes, proving to be one of the most sensitive techniques. This technique is useful at local scales, where it enables the detection of spatial and temporal changes in rodent abundance. Survey question on the presence of rodents represented the most inexpensive technique, being useful at broad scales where it shows linear relationships with rodent estimations obtained by trapping surveys.