Assessing habitat availability and connectivity for the jaguar Panthera onca, in the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico.

摘要

Current trends in biodiversity conservation are based on maintaining suitable habitat conditions not just within protected areas, but also on adjacent, sustainably managed lands. This is especially challenging for the conservation of large carnivores such as the jaguar that require connected habitats to minimize extinction risks and facilitate movement while minimizing conflicts with humans. This study provides spatially explicit habitat information for jaguar management and the implementation of corridors linking its populations in the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico, an area of international significance for the species. First, both comprehensive and sex-based habitat suitability models based on jaguar occurrence records and a combination of land use and land cover (LULC), distance to infrastructures (human settlements and roads), and climate (mean annual precipitation) were constructed using MaxEnt. Then, this information was used to derive a cost surface for mapping suitable corridors, linking four locations (nodes) where current jaguar observations were concentrated. The performance of all models was excellent, but slightly higher for either the female (AUC = 0.928±0.014), or the male (AUC = 0.942±0.042) models than for the comprehensive one (AUC = 0.889±0.047), despite its larger sample size. While LULC was a better predictor for the female model, all models showed that highly suitable areas were scarce in the region and were mostly associated with tropical evergreen forests. Suitable habitat patches were more fragmented for the male or comprehensive models than for the one for females only. Five potential corridors of varying quality have been identified between the population nodes, the best one being from Calakmul to Sian Ka’an along the eastern Caribbean coast, followed by Sian Ka’an to Ria Lagartos. The corridor connecting northern locations from Ria Lagartos to Ria Celestun had the poorest habitat conditions. The suitable habitat models and corridors support the potential value for conservation of productive lands under sustainable forest management since most potential suitable habitats for jaguars were found outside protected areas. These results can be useful to highlight areas of potential opportunities or conflicts for jaguar conservation in a human-dominated landscape and to target areas for further jaguar surveys.;Keywords: biodiversity conservation, landscape ecology, habitat modeling, corridor, connectivity, jaguar, Mexico.