Abundância, uso do habitat e interações ecológicas da jaguatirica em áreas protegidas da Mata Atlântica

• Ano de defesa: 2016
• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigo Lima Massara
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; UFMG
• Palavras-chave em Português: Ecologia Conservação e Manejo da Vida Silvestre; Ecologia
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/BUBD-AAZQUK

Fragmentation and habitat loss are the main threats to biodiversity. To prevent an increase in the current rate of biodiversity loss, most countries have implemented protected areas. However, it is uncertain whether protected areas are adequate for the long-term conservation of species worldwide especially in the tropics. In the Atlantic Forest, > 80% of forest remnants are small (50 ha) and 61% of these are isolated from protected areas, which protect only 9% of the remaining forest and are embedded in a human-managed matrix. This current scenario is ineffective for the persistence of large mammal species, such as jaguars and pumas, which may result in trophic cascades. Although the ocelot is an opportunistic species with life-history characteristics that may allow it to replace top predators (jaguar and puma) in Atlantic forests remnants, it has a high affinity for closed canopy forested areas. Therefore, it is unknown whether the species is replacing top predators and flourishing in these forest remnants, possibly causing deleterious effects on other mesocarnivores (i.e., mesopredator release), or if ocelot abundance and distribution is similarly influenced by the loss of large forested areas. In this study we used a standardize camera trap protocol to investigated ocelot status in six Atlantic Forest protected areas, quantifying its abundance, density and distribution (probability of use). Likewise, we explored how landscape features (e.g., matrix areas and reserve size) and individual covariates affect the species in this current scenario. We also investigated whether ocelots represent a potential threat to other mesocarnivores or if potential competitors (i.e., top predators and domestic dogs) influence ocelot abundance, distribution or detection. We explored additional factors that may cause differences in detection probabilities among our sampling locations and adjusted for these differences to obtain unbiased estimates of the parameters of interest. Ocelot abundance and use were positively correlated with the presence of top predators and negatively correlated with the number of dogs. Ocelot abundance was also positively correlated with reserve size. We found higher detection probabilities in less forested areas and in areas with more eucalyptus. We suspect that smaller home ranges and higher movement rates in smaller, more degraded areas increased detection probabilities. Additionally, eucalyptus appear to serve as an important and more protected travel route for connecting natural habitats of Atlantic Forest. Our findings suggest that ocelot occurrence did not influence the habitat use of other mesocarnivores and the ability of some species (jaguarundi, little spotted cat, coati and tayra) to adjust their activity patterns to avoid a direct contact with ocelots may facilitate their coexistence in these Atlantic Forest remnants. Overall, our findings indicate that protected areas with both top predators and surrounded by permeable matrices, such as eucalyptus, may be critical to the persistence of ocelots in the current scenario of the Atlantic Forest. Additionally, our data do not corroborate the hypothesis of mesopredator release. Rather, our data indicates that ocelots respond negatively to habitat loss and overlap temporally and spatially with top predators in large protected areas.