The Sumatran Tiger's Corridor in Agam, West Sumatra: An Initial Analysis of the Metrics Indices Landscape

Increased habitat pressure is indicated by high levels of human-tiger conflict (HTC). For Sumatran tigers to survive, structural corridor management is essential to managing the tiger metapopulation. Since 2016, Agam Regency has seen a sharp rise in HTC. This exploratory study aimed to understand variations in the corridor's forest cover and to evaluate the relationship between landscape metric indicators and fluctuations in HTC density. Agam's corridor is separated into 31 grids (3x3km). HTC information was gathered from earlier studies and web searches for incidents from 2000 to 2024. Tropical Forest Monitoring's landcover dataset was obtained through the use of a Google Earth Engine script. The LecoS plug-in is used to calculate landscape metric indices. For non-normally distributed data, the Spearman correlation statistic (95% CI) is employed. Before the HTC series in 2016, there was a twofold increase in deforestation, from 0.56% to 1.1% between 2010 and 2015. Nine landscape metrics, including forest area, forest proportion, NP, PD, GPA, LPI, PCI, and splitting index, exhibited a significant correlation with HTC density (p-value < 0.05). Around the corridor, high HTC density was associated with PD >10 patches km-2, LPI