Bridging gaps on population knowledge of giant armadillos: importance of intensify sampling efforts in highly-modified landscapes to accurately estimate species occurrence
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Conservation Biology
- Keywords
- Agro ecosystems, Cerrado, Atlantic Forest, Cingulata, fragmented landscapes, Neotropical savannas, Priodontes maximus, biodiversity loss, wildlife conservation
- Copyright
- © 2017 Lemos et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Bridging gaps on population knowledge of giant armadillos: importance of intensify sampling efforts in highly-modified landscapes to accurately estimate species occurrence. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2897v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2897v1
Abstract
Studies on threatened species in highly modified and unprotected landscapes are necessary to the development of appropriate conservation and management policies. This is particularly important for species with large home-ranges, such as the giant armadillo (Priodontes maximus), whose occurrence in anthropogenic landscapes is poorly understood despite its status as endangered to extinction species. We searched for giant armadillos within human-modified areas in Central Brazil using direct and indirect methods (camera trapping, occasional sightings, recovered carcasses of road-killed and poached animals, burrows and tracks) across a wide region dominated by diverse farming environments and scattered natural remnants. We amassed 52 records of giant armadillos during a 13-year period within 10 municipalities of Minas Gerais and Goiás States, constituting the largest sampling effort and scale for this species to date. Records were mostly distributed in private natural fragments, while some were in protected units. Native vegetation covered most of the occurrence points (85%), while a small portion of records (15%) occurred in anthropic environments (pastures and roads). Our results upheld the suggested distribution for P. maximus while amending previous assumptions regarding this species absence in parts of the studied region in Central Brazil. More importantly, we confirmed the presence of giant armadillos within a wide, intensely human-altered region, likely as result of the extinction debt. These results indicate that Cerrado and Atlantic Forest remnants in human-modified landscapes in Central Brazil have been playing an important role as refuges for this armadillo species, as their use of anthropic environments such as pastures is much less frequent as evidenced by the occurrence records and behavioral patterns. As the giant armadillo can serve as prey to large carnivores as well as help controlling the density of herbivore insects while acting as ecosystem engineers, they play an essential role in community dynamics and merit urgent and decisive conservation efforts.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints