• Devendra DuttaPandey
• Ashish Kumar Jangid
• Vinod S. Narayane

Changes in major land use patterns resulting in deforestation is increasing the probabilities of man-animal conflicts. In special context to snakes, snakes are finding their refuge around human habitation unlike other big animals, due to availability of food. This is resulting in incidents of snake bites. To understand this threat, identifying major drivers of human-snake encounters are needed. The current research is a preliminary approach towards knowing pragmatic factors for snake occurrence in human dominated landscape in Siliguri town of West Bengal (India). Occurrence of snakes (N=51) in town and villages were recorded to model the dependency on ecological and anthropological factors, i.e. Distance from forests and water sources, precipitation of wettest quarter, terrain elevation and temperature of wettest quarter using multinomial logistic regression. Model Ψ(Pr~Forest+Water+Bio16+Alt) found as best model (AIC~91.81) among seven regression models, which suggested negative significance of the occurrence probability of snakes with mentioned variables in human dominated areas, depicted as distance from forests (β -0.60±0.10; p<<0.05), distance from water sources (β -0.33±0.07; p<<0.05), precipitation of wettest quarter (β -0.50±0.12; p<0.05) and terrain elevation (β -0.33±0.12; p<0.05). Spectacled cobra has the relatively highest encounters among all observations.

Snakes, Human dominated areas, Human-snake conflicts, Snakebite, North Bengal.

"UNDERSTANDING THE SNAKE ENCOUNTERS IN HUMAN DOMINATED AREAS OF NORTH BENGAL: A CASE STUDY OF SILIGURI, WEST BENGAL", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.6, Issue 5, page no.62-67, May-2019, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIRCB06009.pdf

"UNDERSTANDING THE SNAKE ENCOUNTERS IN HUMAN DOMINATED AREAS OF NORTH BENGAL: A CASE STUDY OF SILIGURI, WEST BENGAL", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.6, Issue 5, page no. pp62-67, May-2019, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIRCB06009.pdf