Barriers, corridors or suitable habitat? Effect of monoculture tree plantations on the habitat use and prey availability for jaguars and pumas in the Atlantic Forest

PAVIOLO, AGUSTIN; CRUZ, PAULA; IEZZI, MARÍA EUGENIA; MARTÍNEZ PARDO, JULIA; VARELA, DIEGO; DE ANGELO, CARLOS; BENITO, SILVIA; VANDERHOEVEN, EZEQUIEL; PALACIO, LUCIA; QUIROGA, VERÓNICA; ARRABAL, JUAN PABLO; COSTA, SEBASTIÁN; DI BITETTI, MARIO SANTIAGO

FOREST ECOLOGY AND MANAGEMENT

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Año: 2018 vol. 430 p. 576 - 586

0378-1127

Large carnivores are key elements of natural ecosystems and most of them are declining due to the impacts ofhuman activities. Jaguars and pumas are the largest felids of the American continent, and particularly jaguarsare critically endangered in the Atlantic Forest of South America. As with other tropical forests, the AtlanticForest has been converted to human land uses including forest tree plantations with exotic species. We assessedjaguars and pumas habitat use in a productive landscape of exotic pine plantations and forest areas in theAtlantic Forest of Argentina. We estimated the availability of their main preys in this landscape and evaluatedthe variables that affect their occupancy pattern. We developed large scale camera traps surveys between 2013and 2014 in an area that includes pine plantations, protected areas, and unprotected areas covered by nativeforest and small rural properties. In total, we sampled 274 sampling stations with an effort of 13,347 camera-trapdays. We used single-species single-season occupancy models to evaluate the effect of the proportion of pineplantation around the sampling station, the cost of human access, and the distance to the edge of the continuousforest block on the occupancy of the felids and its main prey species. For felids, we also evaluated the effect ofthe availability of their prey species. With a few exceptions, the occupancy probabilities of most prey wereaffected by one or two of the landscape variables tested. Habitat use by jaguars and pumas was affected by thisanthropogenic landscape change. Even though the relative proportion of plantation to forest around camerastations did not affect the habitat use of either of the two feline species, other factors associated with thisanthropic land-use, as human accessibility and distance to the continuous forest, did show an effect on these bigcat species. According to our results, relatively small and well-managed areas of exotic tree plantations interspersed with forest areas do not constitute barriers for jaguars and pumas in the Atlantic Forest and can functionas potential corridors. Forest plantations as such, do not appear to constitute optimal habitats for these felids.The role of tree plantations as potential corridors or supplementary habitat for pumas, jaguars and their preyrelies, to different degrees, on the maintenance of a high proportion of native forest among the plantations, on agood connectivity with the large patches of protected forest, and on the control of poaching.