IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| T“rres, N.M.; Diniz Filho, J.A.F.; de Marco Junior, P.; de Almeida J como, A.T.; Silveira, L. | |
| Jaguar Distribution and Conservation Status in Brazil | |
| 2007 Conference Proceeding | |
Jaguar (_Panthera onca_) historical distribution ranging from northern Argentina to southern United States, but with human population increase and natural habitat conversion jaguars have been reducing their distribution to 54% of its historical range. Conservation plans should rely on basic scientific information, specially the knowledge of past and present geographic distribution to evaluate a species conservation status, estimate population size, connectivity and habitat preference. This study proposed to estimate jaguar potential distribution using ecological niche modelling approaches extrapolating present data to unknown areas. We accumulated a total of 1049 jaguar's occurrence points (795 spatially unique in 4 km side grid-cell size), and used climate, topographic and vegetation data as predictive variables. We use GARP and Maxent modeling techniques and compared model's performance through ROC and AUC statistics. Maxent resulted in more restrictive predicted distribution and presented a higher value of AUC (0.93) than GARP (0.89). The models suggest highly suitable areas in Pantanal, Paraguayan Chaco, and Caatinga, and low suitability in most areas of the Amazon. These models appear to do not estimate efficiently the range distribution of this species, but provide an objective ranking of site suitability useful for conservation planning and effort prioritization under financial constrains. |
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