Forest Owlet or Farmer’s owlet: Scale-dependent habitat selection reveals conditional compatibility between Forest Owlet conservation and traditional agroforestry in Gujarat, India

Abstract Understanding how species that are threatened with extinction utilise human-modified landscapes is essential for evidence-based conservation. We investigated multi-scale habitat selection by the Forest Owlet ( Athene blewitti ), an Endangered species, endemic to central India with fewer than 1000 mature individuals, in the Dangs district of Gujarat, the westernmost extent of its range. Using a hierarchical Bayesian occupancy framework, we examined how forest cover and three agricultural land-use types (dry agriculture with trees, dry agriculture without trees, and intensive agriculture) affected occupancy across three nested spatial scales: regional (81 km 2 ), landscape (4 km 2 ), and territory (0.25 km 2 ). At the regional scale, the forest × agriculture interaction term was significantly negative (β = -6.82, 95% CI: -9.87 to -1.59), indicating that owlets favour agroforestry-dominated regions over forest-dominated landscapes. Conversely, at the landscape scale, a significant positive interaction (β = 1.36, 95% CI: 0.41–2.50) revealed synergistic benefits from forest-agriculture mosaics. Agriculture type strongly influenced landscape-scale occupancy: dry agriculture with trees showed positive effects (β = 1.17, 95% CI: 0.43–2.02), whereas dry agriculture without trees had significant negative effects (β = -1.19, 95% CI: -2.28 to -0.29). These findings demonstrate that Forest Owlets are not forest-obligate specialists but occupy complex agroforestry mosaics, requiring multi-scale conservation strategies. We propose that the traditional Malki agroforestry system, which incentives tree retention on farmland, offers conditional compatibility with Forest Owlet conservation, provided that mature cavity-bearing trees and small forest patches are explicitly protected.