A influência do tamanho e agregação dos fragmentos sobre a ocorrência de Lobo-Guará em unidades de conservação no Cerrado

Abstract

Biodiversity hotspots are regions with a high wealth of endemic species that were under serious threat of habitat loss, identified with the aim of prioritizing conservation efforts. The Cerrado was characterized as a biodiversity hotspot in the 2000s due to the significant loss of its original vegetation cover and because it is home to more than a thousand endemic vascular plant species, representing one of the most diverse biomes with a loss of more than fifty percent of its original vegetation cover converted. The objective of this study is to assess the habitat of the species Chrysocyon brachyurus, the maned wolf, in Conservation Units in the Cerrado, as well as to assess the aggregation and amount of habitat in the landscape in these protected areas. The study considered that landscape characteristics, such as the degree of aggregation and the size of fragments, may influence the presence of the species. In Conservation Units where the species occurs, it was observed that the areas tend to be more continuous and less fragmented. It was also observed that Conservation Units with a high percentage of habitat in the landscape tend to have high aggregation, which favors more than one occurrence of the species remaining within the same habitat fragment. For this purpose, we used R software for landscape analysis and statistical analysis. We used occurrence points to relate them to Conservation Units, using the Effective Mesh Size (MESH) metric, in addition to the Percentage of Landscape (PLAND) metric, both metrics from the landscapemetrics package. MESH enabled us to assess the degree of landscape continuity and subdivision, while PLAND quantified the proportion of habitat in the study area, allowing us to relate this information to the interpretation of habitat in protected areas. We performed a linear regression to relate the amount of habitat in the Conservation Units to the landscape aggregation metric and a t-test to assess whether protected areas with confirmed occurrences are different from protected areas without occurrences. In this way, it is possible to discuss the continuity and aggregation of land

use and land cover classes that the maned wolf considers as habitat in the Cerrado. These are important factors for both conservation and management of protected areas in the biome.