Implications of Fine-Grained Habitat Fragmentation and Road Mortality for Jaguar Conservation in the Atlantic Forest, Brazil.

Laury Cullen,Jessica C Stanton,H Reşit Akçakaya,Miriam L L Perilli,Alexandre Uezu,Fernando Lima

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0167372

Abstract

Jaguar (Panthera onca) populations in the Upper Paraná River, in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest region, live in a landscape that includes highly fragmented areas as well as relatively intact ones. We developed a model of jaguar habitat suitability in this region, and based on this habitat model, we developed a spatially structured metapopulation model of the jaguar populations in this area to analyze their viability, the potential impact of road mortality on the populations' persistence, and the interaction between road mortality and habitat fragmentation. In more highly fragmented populations, density of jaguars per unit area is lower and density of roads per jaguar is higher. The populations with the most fragmented habitat were predicted to have much lower persistence in the next 100 years when the model included no dispersal, indicating that the persistence of these populations are dependent to a large extent on dispersal from other populations. This, in turn, indicates that the interaction between road mortality and habitat fragmentation may lead to source-sink dynamics, whereby populations with highly fragmented habitat are maintained only by dispersal from populations with less fragmented habitat. This study demonstrates the utility of linking habitat and demographic models in assessing impacts on species living in fragmented landscapes.

Highlights

Loss of natural vegetation cover often leads to a fragmented distribution of habitat
Based on the estimate of 1 jaguar killed in Morro do Diabo per year, and the assumption that road mortality is a linear function of the road length per jaguar and human density, we estimated overall annual road mortality as 10.4% of the population, resulting in about 39 jaguars killed per year at carrying capacity (Table 1)
Our results indicate that jaguars in the upper Parana-Paranapanema region exist in eight populations with varying sizes and subject to varying degrees of human disturbance

Summary

Introduction

Loss of natural vegetation cover often leads to a fragmented distribution of habitat. How this habitat fragmentation affects species depends on the spatial scale and pattern of the fragmentation in relation to how the species uses the landscape [1]. Grantsmanagement08.com/), 100% Fund from Fauna and Flora International, The Woodland Park Zoo (http://www.zoo.org/), The Whitley Awards (http://whitleyaward.org/), The Rolex Awards (http://www.rolexawards.com/), Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust (https://www.durrell.org/ wildlife/), The Rufford Small Grant Program (http:// www.rufford.org/) and Ridgeway Trust. All the above mentioned funding was received by LC. LC, FL, AU and MLLP received financial support for data and metadata management, curation and analysis from Fundo Brasileiro para a Biodiversidade – Tropical Forest Conservation Act agreement (FUNBio/TFCA). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Methods

Results

Conclusion