Metropolitan Mammals: Understanding the Threats Inside an Urban Protected Area

Abstract

Protected areas (PA) are widely recognized as conservation cornerstones. However, we still lack information about PA effectiveness in conserving biodiversity. With the accelerating process of urbanization, urban PAs have gained increasing importance. Thus, evaluating their effectiveness is particularly urgent, especially when located in a biodiversity hotspot. The aim of this study was to describe the large and medium-sized mammalian community within Tijuca National Park (TNP)-an urban PA located in the Atlantic Forest biodiversity hotspot-and to investigate if it is affected by proximity to the park border and by potential threats that occur inside the park such as roads, hiking trails, tourism infrastructure, domestic dogs and hunting. A camera-trap survey was conducted in a grid with 42 sampling units from April to September 2016. Each sampling unit was categorized as park border or interior and according to the aforementioned potential threats. A model selection framework was employed to evaluate the effects of threats on species richness and abundance. Our findings suggest that TNP harbors an impoverished fauna of large and mediumsized mammals when compared with larger and more well-preserved Atlantic Forest PAs. Furthermore, our results highlight that the mammalian abundance was affected by edge effects, presence of roads and tourism infrastructure and abundance of domestic dogs. We highlight some management actions to properly control and minimize those threats and increase the effectiveness of TNP in conserving biodiversity.

A before−after assessment of the response of mammals to tourism in a Brazilian national park

“…Additionally, a sensible cap in the daily number of tourists (as is the current practice in our study area) is likely to limit the intensity of these impacts. The number of visitors is known to modulate the impacts of tourism on local biodiversity (Das & Chatterjee, 2015) and wildlife avoidance of tourist areas has been reported in highly visited Brazilian national parks (Cunha, 2010; Silva et al, 2018; Monteiro & Lira, 2020). Given that tourism activity has only recently begun and has been growing substantially in the Park (Supplementary Table 1), it is important to realize that the effects of a larger number of tourists could be different from what has been observed in the initial years of visitation, and constant monitoring is necessary to assess any medium- to long-term effects.…”

“…However, tourism-driven impacts are difficult to measure (Buckley, 2003) and the lack of data collected before the intensification or beginning of tourism makes these assessments even more challenging (Butsic et al, 2017). This is the case for national parks in Brazil, where tourism has been growing at an annual rate of 10% (ICMBio, 2019) but studies assessing the impacts of visitors on biodiversity remain scarce (Cunha, 2010; Silva et al, 2018; Monteiro & Lira, 2020).…”