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Habitat selection of jaguars in a seasonally flooded landscape

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Abstract

Ecologists increasingly recognize the importance of habitat selection as a multi-level, hierarchical process, but individual-level variation in selection patterns have yet to be fully evaluated within populations of large carnivores. We assessed jaguar (Panthera onca) selection of forest across seasonally variable forest availability in the Pantanal region of South America. Using resource selection functions (RSF), we evaluated the importance of forest cover for jaguars in a heterogeneous, dynamic landscape, and how seasonal variability in habitat availability influences habitat selection and predation patterns. A multi-level hierarchical analytical framework revealed that jaguars increasingly selected forest cover as availability of other habitats declined due to seasonal flooding. At the population range level, jaguars selected water, forest, and bushy grassland comparably during the dry season, and bushy grassland, forest, and flat grassland during the wet season. At the home range level, bushy grassland and forest were selected during both seasons. Jaguars killed prey animals with comparable frequency across forest, water, and bushy grasslands during the dry season, with more preference detected for forest and avoidance of grasslands. During the wet season, jaguars killed prey disproportionately to their availability in forest and bushy grasslands. These results clearly indicate that jaguars undergo marked dynamic shifts in habitat and kill site selection in response to seasonal flooding, with forest patches becoming more important as the availability of other habitats decreases. Land conservation efforts need to consider variability in jaguar-landscape dynamics associated with seasonal flooding, given increasing pressure to modify native landscapes to more open livestock grazing areas.

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Data availability statement

Data associated with this publication are available from the Dryad Digital Repository (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2dh0223) and Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1219174) published in Morato et al. 2018.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Fazenda Real Filial São Bento for financial support of this work. FCCA thanks FAPESP—Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo for financial support (process # 2007/00976-7) and Luciano M. Verdade for the supervision during FCCA postdoctoral time. In Brazil the permission to conduct this research was granted by the Brazilian Environment Institute (IBAMA) through the IBAMA’s National Center for the Conservation of Predators (CENAP). Institutional support was provided by Instituto Pró-Carnívoros. We thank Henrique Concone, Alexandre Martins, Cynthia Elisa Widmer, Tatiana Ono e Rodrigo Jorge, who, over the years, helped with capturing jaguars and collecting the data. We also thank all people from São Bento ranch, in special João Batista for his support during field work, Marco E. Moraes for letting us establish a research project on his ranch and Edgar Ribeiro and Célio Júnior for their administrative support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departament of Natural Sciences, Federal University of São João del Rei, São João del Rei, Minas Gerais, Brazil

    Fernando Cesar Cascelli de Azevedo

  2. Instituto Pró-Carnívoros, Atibaia, SP, Brazil

    Fernando Cesar Cascelli de Azevedo

  3. Cooperative Wildlife Research Lab, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA

    Guillaume Bastille‐Rousseau

  4. Integrative Wildlife Conservation Lab, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada

    Dennis L. Murray

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  1. Fernando Cesar Cascelli de Azevedo
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  2. Guillaume Bastille‐Rousseau
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  3. Dennis L. Murray
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Contributions

FCCA conceived the study; FCCA, DLM, and GBR designed the methodology; FCCA collected the data; FCCA, and GBR analyzed the data and all authors interpreted the results. FCCA wrote the first version of the manuscript and all the authors contributed substantially to the revisions.

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Correspondence to Fernando Cesar Cascelli de Azevedo.

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de Azevedo, F.C.C., Bastille‐Rousseau, G. & Murray, D.L. Habitat selection of jaguars in a seasonally flooded landscape. Mamm Biol 101, 817–830 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42991-021-00185-4

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