Influence of vegetation physiognomy, elevation and fire frequency on medium and large mammals in two protected areas of the Espinhaço Range

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The objectives of this study were to determine the richness of medium and large mammal species in two protected areas of the Espinhaço Mountain Range, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil; and to investigate the factors affecting the occurrence of those species. To accomplish that we placed 49 camera traps activated by heat and motion at Rio Preto State Park (RPSP) and 48 at Sempre Vivas National Park (SVNP). We also collected data on three environmental variables: vegetation physiognomy, elevation and wildfire frequency, to evaluate the influence of these factors on species richness and use intensity (inferred from camera trap detection rate) by large mammals. We recorded 23 large mammal species in the two parks combined. The lowest species richness was found at the rupestrian habitat of RPSP, and in the open grasslands of SVNP. The forest and savannah physiognomies were used more intensively by large mammals. Species richness was higher and use was greater at lower elevations of RPSP. In SVNP, fire frequency did not affect species richness or use intensity. The savannah habitat had very similar richness compared to the forests of the two protected areas. The high species richness and use intensity observed in these forest habitats highlights the importance of riparian environments in the Cerrado biome. The highest species richness and use intensity observed at low elevation follows patterns found in the literature, probably due to variation in the vegetation, which results in greater resource availability. Although rupestrian habitats at high elevations of the Espinhaço Range are known to have a high degree of endemism for some taxa, large mammal richness and use were not high in this habitat. These results indicate that the protection of native vegetation at lower elevations is crucial for the long-term conservation of large mammals in the Espinhaço Range. KEY WORDS. Cerrado, campo rupestre, species richness, use of habitat, wildfire.

Primary productivity and habitat protection predict elevational species richness and community biomass of large mammals on Mt. Kilimanjaro

“…Our data confirmed that more mammal species, particularly those of large body size, are able to persist in protected than in unprotected areas (Ferreira de Pinho et al, ). Due to their high significance as keystone and umbrella species (Caro, ), the loss of large mammals from unprotected areas is probably connected to changes in the structure of species communities and a decline of ecosystem functions (Dirzo et al, ).…”

“…Research on the distribution of mammal diversity on mountains has until now focused on small mammals (mostly on Insectivora, Rodentia with body weights of 2 g–5 kg), which nearly exclusively show unimodal distributions of elevational diversity (e.g. Brown, ; McCain, ; but see Di Bitetti, Albanesi, Foguet, De Angelo, & Brown, ; Ferreira de Pinho, Braga Ferreira, & Pereira Paglia, ). In contrast, research on large mammals along altitudinal gradients has been scarce.…”

Evaluating the Impacts of Human Activities on Diversity, Abundance, and Distribution of Large Mammals in Nimule National Park, South Sudan

“…These human practices and disturbances scare and threaten large mammals and thus allow them to migrate to new locations elsewhere, reducing their diversity and richness. A similar result by [61] in Brazil found that the species richness of large mammals was less in grassland due to the presence of human disturbances. Additionally, the fact that large mammals have large body sizes which are easily visible by hunting predators, may be one of the reasons for avoiding this open grassland habitat type, Open Journal of Ecology thus their lower distribution [62].…”

Strict protected areas are essential for the conservation of larger and threatened mammals in a priority region of the Brazilian Cerrado

“…Therefore, via careful study design and statistical control of confounding variables we accounted for contextual factors that could potentially affect the outcome of interest but were not directly related to protection, such as distance to towns, roads, and water sources, as well variation in vegetation. These factors have a considerable overlap with the ones used by Carranza et al (2014) to investigate PA effectiveness in avoiding Cerrado deforestation and are known to influence the occurrence of Neotropical mammals (Ferreira et al, 2017;Nagy-Reis et al, 2017;Pinho et al, 2017). In this study, we treated strict PAs as the intervention and APAs as the counterfactual.…”