Priority areas for jaguar conservation 855


geographical range (Sanderson et al., 2002;Rabinowitz & Zeller, 2010; Nijhawan, 2012). Jaguar conservation units are defined as areas with a stable prey community that could ei- ther maintain a resident jaguar population (aminimumof 50 breeding individuals) or contain fewer individuals but with adequate habitat, where the population could increase if threats were reduced (Sanderson et al., 2002). Species distributionmodels have been used to identify areas


of high conservation value for large felid species, including the selection of areas suitable for jaguars (Rodríguez-Soto et al., 2011; Morato et al., 2014; Angelieri et al., 2016; Paviolo et al., 2016). They combine information about the geographical occurrence of species and environmental cov- ariates, and can be used to generate maps that show the habitat suitability for the species (Phillips et al., 2006). We used species distribution models and other


analytical tools to evaluate environmental conditions for jaguar conservation in the Brazilian Cerrado. We aimed to (1) assess the current distribution of jaguars in the biome at a fine resolution, according to environmental and anthropogenic conditions, (2) identify and prioritize potential jaguar conservation units, and (3) review proposed management actions in the priority jaguar conservation units. Compared to previous studies, we expected to expand the potentially suitable area for jaguars in the Cerrado, and thus enhance conservation efforts to save the species in this hotspot.


Study area


The Cerrado (Fig. 1) comprises 2,039,373 km2 of savannah and various types of grasslands and shrublands, as well as tropical, semi-deciduous and deciduous forests (Coutinho, 2000). The climate is seasonal, with rainy summers and dry winters. The mean annual temperature is 22–23 °C and the mean annual rainfall is 1,200–1,800 mm (Coutinho, 2000). The Cerrado has a lowhuman population density and a mean human development index (UNDP, 2018)of 0.71 in the principal municipalities. Agriculture and cattle ranching are the main sources of livelihood (Mueller & Martha, 2008).


Methods


The methods and workflow used to define jaguar conserva- tion units are outlined in Fig. 2.


Presence records The Brazilian National Predator Research Center (Desbiez et al., 2013) provided 126 presence records of jaguars (sight- ings, captured individuals, confirmed tracks, and faeces; Fig. 1, Supplementary Table 1). These records, which include geographical coordinates, were obtained by jaguar


FIG. 1 Locations of 106 jaguar Panthera onca presence records in the Cerrado of Brazil, used to model the habitat suitability for the species.


specialists in the course of field studies in the Cerrado dur- ing 2000–2009. To reduce spatial autocorrelation we firstly rarefied presence records of jaguars within a distance of 9 km, which corresponds to the approximate radius of the jaguar’shome range (265 km2) in the Cerrado (Astete et al., 2008). We then used the SDMtoolbox in ArcGIS 10.2 (ESRI, Redlands, USA) to calculate the heterogeneity of the first three principal components of 13 continuous envir- onmental layers (Table 1), producing a final heterogeneity layer that allowed us to rarefy records by reducing climate autocorrelation among them (Brown, 2014).


Environmental layers


Weselected 15 environmental layers according to their func- tional relevance for the species (Table 1; Elith & Leathwick, 2009; Morato et al., 2014). We used SDMtoolbox (Brown, 2014) to identify Pearson correlations (Pearson’s r,0.5; Angelieri et al., 2016) between the 13 continuous environ- mental variables (Table 1, Supplementary Table 2).


Species distribution modelling


We modelled the current jaguar distribution in the Cerrado biome using Maxent 3.3.3 k (Phillips et al.,


Oryx, 2020, 54(6), 854–865 © 2019 Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605318000972


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