Fires and logging in the Brazilian Amazon pose a major threat to South America’s biggest cat, according to an analysis of jaguars (Panthera onca) and their protected areas.
Brazilian researchers have found that the apex predator’s last strongholds in the rainforest are also the sites with the most severe human pressures, including fires lit to clear land for cattle ranches.
A team led by at the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil say the research pinpoints where limited conservation resources should be targeted to protect the species. The area occupied by the big cat, considered a “keystone species” emblematic of the wider health of an ecosystem, has halved.
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The researchers mapped jaguar densities in 447 protected areas of the Brazilian Amazon, where most of the rove. They then overlaid it with a “threat index” they built using data on human pressures – fires, deforestation, road building, mining and cattle pastures – relative to the size of those protected areas. Cattle farms pose a “double whammy”, the researchers say, because they not only remove jaguar habitat, but ranchers then persecute and hunt the big cats.
The results reveal the protected areas with the highest jaguar densities match those where human pressures are the greatest. These hotspots run roughly along the southern and eastern edges of the Amazon, known as the arc of deforestation.
“This result seems counterintuitive,” says Bogoni. “But the leading drivers of habitat degradation – the deforestation and fires – are impending threats for large numbers of jaguars.” The Amazon saw extreme fires in 2019 in the wake of pro-logging and cattle-ranching rhetoric from Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.
Bogoni’s team identified 19 protected areas, covering almost 400,000 square kilometres, as a priority for conservation funding and resources to best protect the big cats. However, he says their prospects “will likely become worse in the near future” unless the Brazilian government acts to strengthen protected areas with better enforcement and stronger penalties for those who start illegal fires.
Reference: bioRxiv,
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