Priority areas for jaguar conservation 857


TABLE 1 Environmental variables used in species distribution modelling for the jaguar Panthera onca in the Cerrado (Fig. 1), with their original spatial resolution, year and functional relevance, and sources.


Environmental variables *Mean annual temperature


*Mean annual rainfall Land cover


Original spatial resolution1


90 m 90 m 1:250,000


Year 2012


2013 Functional relevance


Used to characterize climate, which can influence felid & prey activities (Astete et al., 2008)


Used to characterize climate, which can influence felid & prey activities (Astete et al., 2008)


2009–2010 Jaguars prefer forested areas&areas near rivers. They avoid human disturbance, selecting areas with a high proportion of natural habitat & a high proportion of closed canopy (Vynne et al., 2011)


*Elevation 90 m 2008


Most important factor in a jaguar species distribution model for the Caatinga biome, with low human activity in high-elevation areas (Morato et al., 2014)


Vegetation height


*Euclidean distance from water & *density of drainage


*Euclidean distance from urban areas


Temporal enhanced vegetation index (*maximum, *minimum, *mean, *rainy (Oct.–Mar.) & *dry (Apr.–Sep.) dry seasons)


30 m 1:250,000 1:250,000 *Slope&*terrain ruggedness 90 m 2007 2013 2008 2008 250 m 2013


Can be an indicator of canopy cover, which has been associated with probability of jaguar presence (Vynne et al., 2011)


Known to influence jaguar occurrence (Morato et al., 2014)


Indicates distance to human activities, which negatively influence the presence of jaguars (De Angelo et al., 2011)


Can affect the movement of some predators & prey (Laporte et al., 2010)


Used as a proxy for primary produc- tivity, as ungulates (the main prey of jaguars in the Cerrado; Astete et al., 2008) respond to primary productivity (Pettorelli et al., 2011)


Source Alvares et al. (2013a) Alvares et al. (2013b)


Vegetation map of 2002 updated to 2009/2010 (Supplementary Material 1)


CGIAR Consortium (2008)


Woods Hole Research Center (2007)


HydroWeb (2010)


Urban areas identified in the land-cover map


Sappington et al. (2007) LAPIG (2013)


1We used a spatial resolution of 250 m for modelling. Where required, resolutions were resampled with the nearest neighbour assignment for continuous layers and the majority resampling technique for categorical layers. *The 13 continuous environmental variables.


binomial probability, and omission error (Pearson, 2010; Supplementary Material 2).Wealso interpreted the margin- al curves of the variables that most influenced the models; these are plots created by Maxent that reflect the dependence of predicted suitability both on the selected variable and on dependencies induced by correlations between the selected variable and other variables (Pearson, 2010). We used an independent dataset of 23 jaguar occur-


rences from the National Predator Research Center (Supplementary Table 3), for 2007–2017, to validate our final model. Jaguar occurrence was predicted correctly if records were within a radius of 9 km of suitable pixels, the same distance used to rarefy records, confirming that pixels were within the potential home range of the individuals.


KF, RGM and FHGR also analysed the final model visually and validated the results.


Jaguar conservation units


We used the best model to select pixels equal to or higher than the median suitability value of the final species distri- bution model (Rodríguez-Soto et al., 2011; Morato et al., 2014) and select highly suitable areas. As the jaguar is a threatened species, we generated polygons using 95%of the volume contour of the isopleth function (Beyer, 2012) to guarantee that areas with high and medium suitability would be selected, thus avoiding restricting prioritization of jaguar conservation units to high suitability areas only.


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


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