Occurrence and conservation of the Vulnerable titi monkey Callicebus melanochir in fragmented landscapes of the Atlantic Forest hotspot RODRIGO COSTA-ARAÚJO,ANDRÉ L UIS REGOL I N,FELIP E MARTELLO
JOÃO PEDRO SOUZA-ALV E S,TOMAS HRBEK and MIL T O N CEZAR RIB EIRO
Abstract Tropical forest hotspots have a high diversity of species but have lost .70% of their original vegetation cover and are characterized by amultitude of small and iso- lated fragments. Paradoxically, conservation actions in these areas are still mainly focused on protection of large tracts of forests, a strategy now infeasible because of the small area of forest remnants. Here we use the Vulnerable black-handed titi monkey Callicebus melanochir as a model to study the effects of habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation on arboreal mammals and to provide insights for science- driven conservation in fragmented landscapes in tropical forest hotspots.We surveyed 38 Atlantic Forest fragments in Bahia State, Brazil and assessed the effects of patch area, quality and visibility, and landscape connectivity on the occurrence of our model species. Patch area was the single best model explaining species occurrence. Nonetheless, patch quality and visibility, and landscape connectivity, positively affect occurrence. In addition to patch area, patch quality, patch visibility and landscape connectivity are useful for predicting the occurrence of arboreal mammals in the fragments of tropical forest hotspots. We encourage the assessment of habitat quality (based on remotely sensed vegetation indices) and habitat visibility (based on digital elevation models) to improve discoverability of arboreal mammal populations and selection of fragments for con- servation purposes across fragmented landscapes of tropical forest hotspots. Large remnants of tropical forest hotspots
RODRIGO COSTA-ARAÚJO* (Corresponding author,
orcid.org/0000-0002-6092-
4892) and TOMAS HRBEK (
orcid.org/0000-0003-3239-7068) Laboratório de Evolução e Genética Animal, Universidade Federal do Amazonas, Avenida Rodrigo Octavio Jordão Ramos 3000, CEP 69077-000, Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil. E-mail
rodrigotbio@gmail.com
ANDRÉ LUIS REGOLIN† (
orcid.org/0000-0003-1820-8400) and MILTON CEZAR RIBEIRO (
orcid.org/0000-0002-4312-202X) Laboratório de Ecologia Espacial e Conservação, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Rio Claro, Brazil
FELIPE MARTELLO (
orcid.org/0000-0003-1243-9750) Universidade Federal de São Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil
JOÃO PEDRO SOUZA-ALVES‡ (
orcid.org/0000-0002-8517-1276) Programa de
Pós-graduação em Biologia Animal, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil
*Also at: Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Manaus, Brazil †Also at: Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, USA ‡Also at: Laboratório de Ecologia, Comportamento e Conservação, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil
Received 31 May 2019. Revision requested 16 July 2019. Accepted 21 December 2019. First published online 26 April 2021.
are scarce and therefore we require baseline data to support conservation actions and management in small forest fragments.
Keywords Atlantic Forest, Brazil, Callicebus melanochir, degradation, ecological modelling, fragmentation, habitat loss, titi monkey
Supplementary material for this article is available at
doi.org/10.1017/S0030605319001522
Introduction
wildlife and the quality of human life. To achieve biodiver- sity conservation, stakeholders must work under a com- mon agenda to put in place actions to protect biodiversity (Bisseleua et al., 2009; Tilman et al., 2014). Effective conser- vation decision-making is guided by scientific information on species (Mace et al., 2012), the currency of conservation (Rylands & Mittermeier, 2014). Baseline data on species is therefore paramount for biodiversity conservation. Deforestation is recognized as the major threat to terres-
B
trial mammals (IUCN, 2019). Forest loss and fragmentation reduce the habitat of forest-dependent mammals and re- strict their populations to small, isolated patches (Fahrig, 2003), leading to population declines and local extinctions (Estrada et al., 2017). Accordingly, conservation science has focused on the impacts of deforestation on species dis- tributions and abundance, and one of the main practical outcomes has been the protection of large tracts of forests (e.g. Soulé & Simberloff, 1986): the patch area paradigm in conservation. Large tracts of forests, however, are currently rare in trop-
ical forest hotspots (areas with a high proportion of endemic plants and extensive vegetation loss; Myers et al., 2000)and themajority of remnants are small (,100 ha) and embedded in human-modified landscapes (Turner & Corlett, 1996). In the absence of funding for large-scale reforestation, conser- vation of mammals in tropical forest hotspots thus needs to focus on a multitude of small forest fragments. The synergis- tic effects of habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation on arboreal mammals need to be examined, to inform strate- gies for population management and species conservation
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2021, 55(6), 916–923 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319001522
iodiversity conservation is essential for the mainten- ance of ecosystem services that guarantee survival of
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