Impending anthropogenic threats and protected area prioritization for jaguars in the Brazilian Amazon.

ABSTRACT: Jaguars (Panthera onca) exert critical top-down control over large vertebrates across the Neotropics. Yet, this iconic species have been declining due to multiple threats, such as habitat loss and hunting, which are rapidly increasing across the New World tropics. Based on geospatial layers, we extracted socio-environmental variables for 447 protected areas across the Brazilian Amazon to identify those that merit short-term high-priority efforts to maximize jaguar persistence. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and comparisons of measures of central tendency. Our results reveal that areas containing the largest jaguar densities and the largest estimated population sizes are precisely among those confronting most anthropogenic threats. Jaguars are threatened in the world's larg

SUBMITTER: Bogoni JA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9932174 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature