Sustainability Agenda for the Pantanal Wetland: Perspectives on a Collaborative Interface for Science, Policy, and Decision-Making.

Building bridges between environmental and political agendas is essential nowadays in face of the increasing human pressure on natural environments, including wetlands. Wetlands provide critical ecosystem services for humanity and can generate a considerable direct or indirect income to the local communities. To meet many of the sustainable development goals, we need to move our trajectory from the current environmental destructive development to a wiser wetland use. The current article contain a proposed agenda for the Pantanal aiming the improvement of public policy for conservation in the Pantanal, one of the largest, most diverse, and continuous inland wetland in the world. We suggest and discuss a list of 11 essential interfaces between science, policy, and development in region linked to the proposed agenda. We believe that a functional science network can booster the collaborative capability to generate creative ideas and solutions to address the big challenges faced by the Pantanal wetland

Resource selection in an apex predator and variation in response to local landscape characteristics

Habitat loss and fragmentation represent major threats for the conservation of apex predators, such as the jaguar (Panthera onca). Investigating species' resource selection behavior in response to landscape alteration is critical for developing relevant conservation management plans. The jaguar is found across a variety of habitats with different gradients of human disturbance, making them a good candidate to study how apex predators respond to increasing intensity of human land use. We developed resource selection models to characterize patterns of jaguar resource selection at two different spatial scales, home range (coarse) and foraging scale (fine). This analysis was based on the largest existing GPS-location dataset for jaguars (n = 40 individuals, n = 87,376 locations), spanning the species' geographic range in Brazil and Argentina. We found that both males and females jaguars exhibited an overall preference for forests and areas close to watercourses at both the home range and foraging scale. At the foraging scale, areas of high livestock density “attracted” male jaguars. We also performed a follow-up analysis to test for context-dependent resource selection (i.e., functional responses) by relating individual behavior to local habitat characteristics. We found that jaguars in heavily-forested landscapes showed strong avoidance of non-forest. Furthermore, we found that only the individuals in closest proximity to watercourses showed positive selection for water. Our results highlight that jaguars display different patterns of resource selection in different areas, demonstrating a considerable ability to use or tolerate a wide variety of different conditions across the species geographic range. This plasticity may allow jaguars to adjust their behavior according to land use changes but also increases human-jaguar conflict and jaguar mortality, especially in areas with high livestock density