Do protected areas in Panama support intact assemblages of ungulates?

Ungulates play an essential role in terrestrial ecosystems, but suffer from hunting and habitat degradation which often results in theirdecline. Panama harbors five species of ungulate and is an important portion of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, but its foresthabitat and its fauna are currently threatened. Protected areas have been designated to preserve the biodiversity, but studies evaluatingtheir effectiveness in maintaining ungulates are lacking in Panama. In this study we used camera-trapping surveys to determine theoccurrence and abundance of the ungulate species in 13 protected areas across Panama. There were large differences in the ungulatecommunities among the sites we surveyed. Some sites were impoverished with just one ungulate species recorded while just a singlesite harbored all five species. The white-lipped peccary was the rarest species and the collared peccaries the most common, capturedin all the sites. Moreover, we found large variation in ungulate abundance across the sites. Our results indicate that few protected areasin Panama effectively maintain the entire assemblage of ungulate species

Effectiveness of Panama as an intercontinental land bridge for large mammals

Habitat fragmentation is a primary driver of wildlife loss, and establishment of biological corridors is a common strategy to mitigate this problem. A flagship example is the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC), which aims to connect protected forest areas between Mexico and Panama to allow dispersal and gene flow of forest organisms. Because forests across Central America have continued to degrade, the functioning of the MBC has been questioned, but reliable estimates of species occurrence were unavailable. Large mammals are suitable indicators of forest functioning, so we assessed their conservation status across the Isthmus of Panama, the narrowest section of the MBC. We used large-scale camera-trap surveys and hierarchical multispecies occupancy models in a Bayesian framework to estimate the occupancy of 9 medium to large mammals and developed an occupancy-weighted connectivity metric to evaluate species-specific functional connectivity. White-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari), jaguar (Panthera onca), giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), and tapir (Tapirus bairdii) had low expected occupancy along the MBC in Panama. Puma (Puma concolor), red brocket deer (Mazama temama), ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), and collared peccary (Pecari tajacu), which are more adaptable, had higher occupancy, even in areas with low forest cover near infrastructure. However, the majority of species were subject to ≥1 gap that was larger than their known dispersal distances, suggesting poor connectivity along the MBC in Panama. Based on our results, forests in Darien, Donoso–Santa Fe, and La Amistad International Park are critical for survival of large terrestrial mammals in Panama and 2 areas need restoration.</p

Response to comments on “Compassionate Conservation deserves a morally serious rather than dismissive response - reply to Callen et al., 2020”

[No abstract available