Towards the restoration of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor for large mammals in Panama: comparing multi-species occupancy to movement models

Abstract

Background: Habitat fragmentation is a primary driver of wildlife loss, and the establishment of biological corridors is a conservation strategy to mitigate this problem. Identifying areas with high potential functional connectivity typically relies on the assessment of landscape resistance to movement. Many modeling approaches exist to estimate resistance surfaces but to date only a handful of studies compared the outputs resulting from different methods. Moreover, as many species are threatened by fragmentation, effective biodiversity conservation requires that corridors simultaneously meet the needs of multiple species. While many corridor planning initiatives focus on single species, we here used a combination of data types and analytical approaches to identify and compare corridors for several large mammal species within the Panama portion of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor. Methods: We divided a large mammal assemblage into two groups depending on the species sensitivity to habitat disturbance. We subsequently used cost-distance methods to produce multi-species corridors which were modeled on the basis of (i) occupancy of nine species derived from camera trapping data collected across Panama, and (ii) step selection functions based on GPS telemetry data from white-lipped peccary Tayassu pecari, puma Puma concolor, and ocelot Leopardus pardalis. In addition to different data sources and species groups, we also used different transformation curves to convert occupancy and step-selection results into landscape resistance values. Results: Corridors modeled differed between sensitive and tolerant species, between the data sets, and between the transformation curves. There were more corridors identified for tolerant species than for sensitive species. For tolerant species, several corridors developed with occupancy data overlapped with corridors produced with step selection functions, but this was not the case for sensitive species. Conclusion: Our study represents the first comparison of multispecies corridors parametrized with step selection functions versus occupancy models. Given the wide variability in output corridors, our findings underscore the need to consider the ecological requirements of several species. Our results also suggest that occupancy models can be used for estimating connectivity of generalist species. Finally, this effort allowed to identify important corridors within the MBC (i) at a country scale and (ii) for several species simultaneously to accurately inform the local authorities in conservation planning. The approach we present is reproducible in other sites and/or for other species.

Predicting wildlife corridors for multiple species in an East African ungulate community

“…Failure to account for these cross-taxon differences could compromise the effectiveness of corridors as well as result in additional monetary costs if the primary focus were meant to preserve ideal corridors for all species [ 38 ]. Therefore, methods to delineate efficient multi-species corridors that will capture wildlife movement across a mammal community, while limiting the area required to protect them, could provide cost-effective options for connectivity conservation [ 49 – 51 ].…”

Editorial: thematic series “Integrating movement ecology with biodiversity research”

“…Three of the six contributions to this Thematic Series directly address multiple species and hence biodiversity. Meyer et al [16] determine movement corridors for nine large forest-dwelling species of mammals, including tapir, two species of both deer and peccary, jaguar, puma, ocelot and the giant ant-eater. The latter as well as the white-lipped peccary and the tapir were treated as highly sensitive species, while the others were labelled "tolerant".…”

Importance of climate‐induced tree species composition changes in forecasting the amount of reachable habitat for forest birds

“…The parameter c , that determines the shape of the curve, was fixed to four considering an intermediate strength of barrier effect of the least favourable areas between habitats. A variation of this parameter rarely results in significant differences in model outputs (Meyer et al, 2020; Zeller et al, 2018). The resistance of degraded forests was arbitrarily fixed to the 95 th quantile of resistance values in forests.…”