Assessing carnivore spatial co‐occurrence and temporal overlap in the face of human interference in a semiarid forest

ZANÓN MARTÍNEZ, JUAN I.; SEOANE, JAVIER; KELLY, MARCELLA J.; SARASOLA, JOSÉ HERNÁN; TRAVAINI, ALEJANDRO

ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS

ECOLOGICAL SOC AMER

Año: 2022 vol. 32

1051-0761

Apex predators drive top-down effects in ecosystems and the loss of such speciescan trigger mesopredator release. This ecological process has been well documented in humanmodified small areas, but for management and conservation of ecological communities, it isimportant to know which human factors affect apex predator occurrence and which mediatemesopredators release at large scales. We hypothesized that mesopredators would avoid spatialand temporal overlap with the apex predator, the puma; but that human perturbations (i.e.,cattle raising and trophy hunting) would dampen top-down effects and mediate habitat use.We installed 16 camera traps in each of 45, 10 × 10 km grid cells in the Calden forest region of ´central Argentina resulting in 706 total stations covering 61,611 km2. We used single-seasonoccupancy and two-species co-occurrence models and calculated the species interaction factor(SIF) to explore the contributions of habitat, biotic, and anthropic variables in explaining cooccurrence between carnivore pairs. We also used kernel density estimation techniques to analyze temporal overlap in activity patterns of the carnivore guild. We found that puma habitatuse increased with abundance of large prey and with proximity to protected areas. Geoffroy?scats and skunks spatially avoided pumas and this effect was strong and mediated by distanceto protected areas and game reserves, but pumas did not influence pampas fox and pampas catspace use. At medium and low levels of puma occupancy, we found evidence of spatial avoidance between three pairs of mesocarnivores. All predators were mostly nocturnal and crepuscular across seasons and mesopredators showed little consistent evidence of changing activitypatterns with varying levels of puma occupancy or human interference. We found potential formesopredator release at large scale, especially on the spatial niche axis. Our results suggest thata combination of interacting factors, in conjunction with habitat features and interveninghuman activities, may make mesopredator release unlikely or difficult to discern at broadscales. Overall, we believe that promoting the creation of new protected areas linked by smallforest patches would likely lead to increased predator and prey abundances, as well as the interactions among carnivores inside and outside of protected areas.