Determinants of jaguar occupancy at the northern range edge

A review of environmental and anthropogenic variables used to model jaguar occurrence

Jaguars (Panthera onca) are a landscape species of conservation importance and our understanding of environmental and anthropogenic drivers of jaguar occurrence is necessary to improve conservation strategies. We reviewed available literature to simply describe environmental and anthropogenic variables used and found to be significant in occurrence modeling. We reviewed 95 documents published from 1980 to 2021 that focused on jaguar occurrence and that used 39 variable types (21 anthropogenic, 18 environmental) among different techniques, scales, and approaches. In general, these variables included both anthropogenic (roads, land use, human activities, and population) and environmental (climate, vegetation, ecological interactions, topographic, water, and others) factors. Twelve variables were identified as affecting jaguar occurrence overall, eleven at local scale and seven at broad scales (regional and continental). Focusing more specifically on the variables that correlate with occurrence should help researchers to make better predictions in areas without quantitative jaguar data.

Integrating presence-only and occupancy data to model habitat use for the northernmost population of jaguars

Species distribution models (SDMs) have become an essential tool for the management and conservation of imperiled species. However, many at-risk species are rare and characterized by limited data on their spatial distribution and habitat relationships. This has led to the development of SDMs that integrate multiple types and sources of data to leverage more information and provide improved predictions of habitat associations. We developed a novel integrated species distribution model to predict habitat suitability for jaguars (Panthera onca) in the border region between northern Mexico and the southwestern USA. Our model combined presence-only and occupancy data to identify key environmental correlates, and we used model results to develop a probability of use map. We adopted a logistic regression modeling framework, which we found to be more straightforward and less computationally intensive to fit than Poisson point process-based models. Model results suggested that high terrain ruggedness and the presence of riparian vegetation were most strongly related to habitat use by jaguars in our study region. Our best model, on average, predicted that there is currently 25,463 km² of usable habitat in our study region. The United States portion of the study region, which makes up 38.6% of the total area, contained 40.6% of the total usable habitat. Even though there have been few detections of jaguars in the southwestern USA in recent decades, our results suggest that protection of currently suitable habitats, along with increased conservation efforts, could significantly contribute to the recovery of jaguars in the USA.