Modeling the abundance and productivity distribution to understand the habitat-species relationship: the guanaco (Lama guanicoe) case study' in its current form for publication in Wildlife Research.

FLORES C; BELLIS, L. M.; SCHIAVINI, A

WILDLIFE RESEARCH

CSIRO PUBLISHING

Lugar: Collingwood; Año: 2020

1035-3712

Large wild herbivores are relatively difficult to conserve since their broad habitat requirements overlap with different human activities. This is particularly important for guanaco (Lama guanicoe) in the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, due to environmental constrictions, hunting and livestock activities. Therefore, to understand how the guanaco responds to environmental heterogeneity would be helpful to predict how different scenarios could affect its conservation status. We used Density Surface Models (1) to identify what environmental (forage availability, weather) and anthropogenic (hunting, interspecific competitive) factors explain the abundance and productivity distribution of the guanaco; (2) to estimate the abundance and productivity of the guanaco in the whole study area; (3) and to describe their distribution patterns. The highest abundance and productivity of guanaco occurred where Mesic Grassland was dominant, except in the year 2015 for guanaco productivity, when the most frequent values of NDVI in interaction with livestock were the lowest. These zones presented the lowest elevation and low-intermediate livestock, and less distance from the ranch buildings depending on the date sampling. The estimated abundance was significantly higher in the breeding season (5,614 and 12,444 individuals) than in the non-breeding season (2,921 and 4,883 individuals), with greater clustering in 2014 than in 2015. The estimated productivity was 0.72 chulengos per family group. The guanaco responded to forage availability occupying the zones with a low-intermediate food source in the breeding season. This could be due to interspecific competition and predation by feral dogs, assuming that lower and nearest zones from the human settlements present more escape probability and fewer predators respectively. Hence, the guanaco could trade-off food supply by predation safety during the birth season, suggesting that predation and livestock would be the bottleneck in the conservation of guanaco.