Data analysis.We investigated the relationship between sambar pellet-group counts (response variable) and the above 10 environmental variables using generalised linear mixed models with negative binomial error terms. We did not standardise these variables when performing the regression analyses. To reduce possible effects of multicollinearity, we discarded one independent variable of each tested pair if the between variable association had an r-value>0.5 (Torres et al., 2011).The choice of which correlated variable to remove was based on the relative strength of its Pearson correlation with the frequency of pellet counts.