Monitoring mammals in the Caxiuanã National Forest, Brazil – First results from the Tropical Ecology, Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) program

Abstract

The need for long-term biodiversity monitoring using standardized protocols led to the creation of the Tropical Ecology, Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) initiative. At some 50 field stations in tropical forests around the world, TEAM will monitor various taxa such as ants, birds, butterflies, medium and large terrestrial mammals, primates, litter fall, and trees, as well as landscape change in nine tropical biodiversity hotspots and three tropical wilderness areas. The TEAM terrestrial mammal program calls for using a grid of camera phototraps to monitor long-term trends in densities and occupancy rates of species that can or cannot be uniquely identified, respectively. We describe the TEAM camera phototrapping program and provide results for the first TEAM site-Caxiuanã National Forest in northern Brazil. An intensive one year camera trapping effort was carried out to determine which months were most suitable for long-term monitoring. Fifteen species of medium and large terrestrial mammals and two large birds were recorded, including three xenarthrans, five carnivores, one perissodactyle, three artiodactyles, two rodents, and one marsupial. The medium and large terrestrial mammal diversity was well represented during two consecutive wet and dry months, respectively. We also recorded activity patterns for all species photographed by our camera traps more than 10 times.

Subsistence hunting of Cuniculus pacain the middle of the Solimões River, Amazonas, Brazil

“…The lack of visual records may be influenced by the time of monitoring, since paca is a species of nocturnal habits (Weckel et al, 2006;Martins et al, 2007;Harmsen et al, 2011). The abundance registered on the nocturnal transects is not comparable to those presented in other works (e.g.…”

“…A species of nocturnal habit (Weckel et al, 2006;Martins et al, 2007), the paca is less active on moonlit nights (Harmsen et al, 2011). Its distribution is related to the location of water bodies (Aquino et al, 2009;Harmsen et al, 2011;Pérez et al 2010), and there are only a few estimates of paca abundance using the most frequently employed methods, such as sightings and camera traps (e.g.…”

Records of the giant-armadillo Priodontes maximus (Cingulata: Dasypodidae) in the Atlantic Forest: are Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo the last strongholds of the species?

“…The giant armadillo has been recently recorded in the Amazon (PERES 2001, PERES et al 2003, TROLLE 2003a, MARTINS et al 2007), Cerrado (ANACLETO & MARINHO-FILHO 2001, SANTOS-FILHO & SILVA 2001, MARINHO-FILHO et al 2002, ROCHA & DALPONTE 2006, ANACLETO 2007 and Pantanal (TROLLE 2003b, TROLLE & KÉRY 2005), but such records are exceedingly rare in the Atlantic Forest. CHIARELLO et al (2007) speculated that this species was naturally rare in Espírito Santo.…”

Domestic dogs in Atlantic forest preserves of south-eastern Brazil: a camera-trapping study on patterns of entrance and site occupancy rates

“…The type 1 record, being restrictive, diminishes the chance of a same individual of a given species being photographed repeatedly during the sampling period, which would inflate the frequency of records (i.e., record rate) of this species in comparison to others. So the type 1 record was regarded as a less biased estimator of record rates when several species are compared (see Martins and Sanderson, 2006 for a relevant discussion on this). To check if frequency of domestic dogs in SLBS varied according to climate we used two approaches.…”