Snapshot of the Atlantic Forest canopy: surveying arboreal mammals in a biodiversity hotspot


MAR I A N E C. KAIZER,THIAGO H.G. ALV IM,CLAUDIO L. NOVAE S ALL A N D. MCDEVI TT and ROBE R T J. YOUNG


Abstract The Atlantic Forest of South America supports a rich terrestrial biodiversity but has been reduced to only a small extent of its original forest cover. It hosts a large number of endemic mammalian species but our knowledge of arborealmammal ecology and conservation has been lim- ited because of the challenges of observing arboreal species from ground level. Camera trapping has proven to be an ef- fective tool in terrestrial mammal monitoring but the tech- nique has rarely been used for arboreal species. For the first time in the Atlantic Forest,we obtained data on the arboreal mammal community using arboreal camera trapping, focusing on Caparaó National Park, Brazil. We placed 24 infrared camera traps in the forest canopy in seven areas within the Park, operating them continuously during January 2017–June 2019. During this period the camera traps accumulated 4,736 camera-days of footage and gener- ated a total of 2,256 photographs and 30-s videos of ver- tebrates. The arboreal camera traps were able to detect arboreal mammals of a range of body sizes. The mammal assemblage comprised 15 identifiable species, including the Critically Endangered northernmuriqui Brachyteles hypox- anthus and buffy-headed marmoset Callithrix flaviceps as well as other rare, nocturnal and inconspicuous species. We confirmed for the first time the occurrence of the thin-spined porcupine Chaetomys subspinosus in the Park. Species richness varied across survey areas and forest types. Our findings demonstrate the potential of arboreal camera trapping to inform conservation strategies.


Keywords Arboreal mammals, Atlantic Forest, Brazil, camera trapping, canopy research methods, Caparaó National Park, conservation, protected area


Supplementary material for this article is available at doi.org/10.1017/S0030605321001563


Introduction


plored because of the difficulty of access (Linsenmair et al., 2001; Lowman, 2009; Lowman et al., 2013). Approximately three-quarters of terrestrial forest verte- brates in the tropics, including a diversity of mammals, live strictly or partially in the arboreal realm (Eisenberg & Thorington, 1973; Kays & Allison, 2001). For many years, tropical arboreal mammals were inventoried and observed traditionally, using ground-based methods, which often failed to record cryptic, fast-moving or nocturnal species (Lowman & Moffett, 1993; Kays & Allison, 2001; Whitworth et al., 2016; Bowler et al., 2017; Moore et al., 2020). These methods are also difficult to implement in remote areas and on a large scale. Recent advances in canopy access tech- niques (Lowman, 2009) and the incorporation of emerging technologies into conservation (Pimm et al., 2015; Marvin et al., 2016) have proven useful for overcoming these difficulties, thereby increasing our knowledge of arboreal mammals (e.g. arboreal camera traps: Gregory et al., 2014; drones: Kays et al., 2019; passive acoustic recording: Duarte et al., 2018; environmental DNA: Sales et al., 2020). Identifying effective approaches for assessing and moni-


T MARIANE C. KAIZER (Corresponding author, orcid.org/0000-0001-9105-9478,


m.dacruzkaizer@edu.salford.ac.uk) School of Science, Engineering & Environment, Peel Building, University of Salford, Salford, M5 4WT, UK


THIAGO H.G.ALVIM andCLAUDIO L.NOVAES ( orcid.org/0000-0002-1692-369X) Rede Eco-Diversa para Conservação da Biodiversidade, Tombos, Brazil


ALLAN D. MCDEVITT ( orcid.org/0000-0002-2677-7833) and ROBERT J. YOUNG ( orcid.org/0000-0002-8407-2348) University of Salford, Salford, UK


Received 10 March 2021. Revision requested 6 April 2021. Accepted 26 October 2021. First published online 17 October 2022.


toring the arboreal mammal community is vital for driving management and conservation. Arboreal mammals com- prise a high proportion of rainforest animal biomass and play fundamental functional roles in the maintenance of forest ecosystems (Kays & Allison, 2001), including pollin- ation, top-down regulation of prey, folivory, seed dispersal and maintenance of forest carbon storage (Kays & Allison, 2001; Jorge et al., 2013; Bello et al., 2015; Bufalo et al., 2016; Bogoni et al., 2019). Arboreal mammals are sensitive to habi- tat disturbance (Whitworth et al., 2019), and so anthro- pogenic impacts could lead to the decline or loss of such species (Dirzo et al., 2014). This could cause changes in com- munity composition and functional diversity (Jorge et al., 2013; Dirzo et al., 2014; Bovendorp et al., 2019). The Atlantic Forest of South America is one of the hottest


global biodiversity hotspots because it harbours one of the greatest diversities of plants and vertebrates, has a high level of endemism and contains many threatened species (Myers et al., 2000; Laurance, 2009). This originally vast biome (1.5 million km2) has been reduced to only c. 12% (c. 163,000 km2) of its original forest cover in Brazil, most of which persists as highly fragmented areas of ,50 ha


This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms ofthe Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use. Oryx, 2022, 56(6), 825–836 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605321001563


ropical forest canopies host between half and two- thirds of terrestrial biodiversity yet remain poorly ex-


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