Chrysocyon brachyurus in Argentina 249
them into two categories: maned wolves exposed to particu- lar hazards (road-killed, live-captured, roaming in urban areas, hunted, injured, sick, attacked by dogs or affected by drought and/or fire) and free-living maned wolves not exposed to such hazards. We generated a map of all records and visualized the re-
cords of maned wolves exposed to hazards using a heatmap. For comparative purposes we also added a layer showing the distribution of the records reported by Queirolo et al. (2011). We then superimposed these three layers on a map of the Argentine ecoregions. We estimated the maned wolf’s range using the area of occupancy and extent of oc- currence, and compared two sets of data: (1) 1988–2008, re- ferring to records reported by Queirolo et al. (2011) plus new records for the same period; (2) 1988–2021, referring to the whole dataset (records from Queirolo et al., 2011, plus our new data for 1988–2008 and 2009–2021). We calculated the area of occupancy by adding the area of the squares of the grid in which the species was present (using 50 × 50 km grid cells) and the extent of occurrence using the minimum convexpolygon calculatedwithGeoCAT(Bachmanet al., 2011). We obtained 1,051 new records of C. brachyurus in
Argentina for 2009–2021 (Fig. 1), 423 of which were of wolves exposed to hazards (292 killed on roads, 53 captured alive, 31 roaming in urban areas, 18 hunted, 18 injured or sick, seven attacked by dogs and four affected by drought and/or fire). The geographical distribution of the records of maned wolves exposed to hazards were concentrated in marginal areas of the Chaco Humedo and near the transi- tion area between the Chaco Humedo, Espinal and Chaco Seco, overlapping with the south-western marginal areas of the range reported by Queirolo et al. (2011). We found 178 records for 1988–2008 that had not been reported previ- ously. The area of occupancy calculated from the data for 1988–2008 was 310,000 km2 (extent of occurrence: 513,268 km2), whereas the area of occupancy calculated from the data for 1988–2021 was 500,000 km2 (extent of occurrence: 838,474 km2). Large canids have undergone significant changes in dis-
tribution ranges, associated with climatic and biogeograph- ical environmental factors (Wolf & Ripple, 2017). The maned wolf is no exception to this global phenomenon. Projections for 2050 predict there will be a 33% reduction in the habitats where the maned wolf currently occurs in South America, with some stable areas remaining in the central part of its range (Torres et al., 2013). The species has been increasingly recorded in deforested areas in Brazil (Paula & DeMatteo, 2015). In Argentina, records of themaned wolf have increased since 2010 and there is intense modification of the species’ habitat (Nanni et al., 2020). Most of the new records reported here are in the Chaco
Seco, Espinal and Pampas ecoregions, and many corres- pond to marginal areas of the distribution range reported by Queirolo et al. (2011), where habitat suitability for the
maned wolf is intermediate or low (Coelho et al., 2018). In such areas, local threats could have a significant impact on the conservation of the species, given the high frequency of exposure to anthropogenic factors and identified hazards (Fig. 1).Ahigh proportion of these three ecoregions is modi- fied and/or transformed, with few protected areas (Nanni et al., 2020). Livestock and crop production have been iden- tified previously as the greatest pressures in the Argentine ecoregions where the maned wolf occurs (Nanni et al., 2020). These pressures have increased in the Chaco Seco and Espinal during the last 10 years, where the species was formerly less prevalent, except in a small transitional area between ecoregions. Although the Pampas ecoregion was initially the main area of agricultural development in Argentina, deforestation has expanded into the Espinal and Chaco ecoregions, which account for 80% of deforest- ation in the country (Nanni et al., 2020). Additionally, in re- cent years the increase in global temperature associated with anthropogenic activity has led to successive fires in a large part of the maned wolf’s range, resulting in the disappear- ance of a large proportion of the wetlands typically used by the species in Argentina (Saucedo et al., 2022). The envir- onmental changes associated with high rates of deforest- ation in some ecoregions and the increase in croplands throughout the range of the species, together with the potential effects of changes in rainfall and temperature (Torres et al., 2013; Coelho et al., 2018), could, to some extent, explain the records in new areas. The results of our study show that the current area of occupancy of the maned wolf in Argentina is 61% higher than that for 1988–2008. However the location and fre- quency of reported hazards and the intense environmental transformation in areas where the species has been newly documented suggest counterintuitive implications for the conservation of the species because of increased human– wildlife interactions. The threats faced by maned wolves in these areas appear to be increasing and the species is ex- posed to road accidents, urbanization, hunting and diseases (Soler et al., 2005; González Ciccia et al., 2010; Orozco et al., 2014, 2015). This update identifies the areas in Argentina where con-
servation efforts for the maned wolf are urgent because of exposure to identified hazards. Historically, most research and conservation projects have focused on areas where the species appears to be abundant and has been recorded fre- quently. Long-term studies on the presence of the maned wolf in marginal areas of its range are necessary for evaluat- ing habitat use and determining environmental suitability for the species across its entire range. We highlight the im- portance of a risk analysis to identify the hotspots of threats to the maned wolf in Argentina. Until knowledge of the demographic and ecological characteristics of the marginal populations of the maned wolf is improved, we emphasize the importance of protected areas as biological corridors
Oryx, 2023, 57(2), 248–251 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605322001272
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