Environmental Factors Influencing the Occurrence of Unhealthy Tapirs in the Southern Yucatan Peninsula
- PDF / 2,993,343 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 593.972 x 792 pts Page_size
- 57 Downloads / 196 Views
Ó 2020 EcoHealth Alliance
Original Contribution
Environmental Factors Influencing the Occurrence of Unhealthy Tapirs in the Southern Yucatan Peninsula Jonathan Pe´rez Flores ,1 Holger Weissenberger,1 Antonio Lo´pez-Cen,2 and Sophie Calme´ 1,3 1
El Colegio de La Frontera Sur, Ave. Centenario Km 5.5 Carretera Calderitas, 77900 Chetumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico Pronatura Penı´nsula de Yucata´n, A.C., Calle 32 nu´mero 269 Av. Francisco I. Madero, Colonia Santa Lucı´a, San Francisco de Campeche, 24020 Campeche, Mexico 3 Faculte´ Des Sciences, Universite´ de Sherbrooke, 2500 Boulevard de l’Universite´, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada 2
Abstract: Information about the effects of environmental degradation on the health of terrestrial forest wildlife is limited, especially for rare species. In this study, we analyse the influence of ecological factors such as landscape characteristics and seasonality on the health status of Baird’s tapirs in Calakmul, Mexico. We collected georeferenced photographic records of healthy (n = 32) and unhealthy (n = 22) tapirs from 2008 to 2019 and characterized landscape composition around each record at three spatial scales (circular buffers of 1, 2 and 3-km radii according to Baird’s tapir home ranges). Our logistic model building process consisted in selecting the best spatial scale for each landscape cover class, before including them along with distance to human settlements and seasonality in a full model. The model that best explained the occurrence of unhealthy tapirs included the percentage of agriculture within a 1-km radius. This study hints at the negative effect that land-use change to agriculture occurring in Calakmul might have on tapir health, with 95.45% of unhealthy tapirs recorded in such landscapes. Further studies should investigate the proximate determinants of tapir health in anthropogenic landscapes, which might be linked to stress or to contact with domestic animals. Keywords: Agriculture, Calakmul, Environmental degradation, Global change, Health, Tapirus
INTRODUCTION Health is one of the principal factors we need to understand to conserve wildlife (Deem et al. 2001). Although most wildlife health studies have been carried out from a centricdisease approach (Stephen 2014; Wittrock et al. 2019),
Correspondence to: Jonathan Pe´rez Flores, e-mail: [email protected]
wildlife health involves more than just the interaction between an animal individual/population and pathogens (Stephen 2014). In recent years, wildlife health has been defined based on three crucial features: (1) health is the result of the interaction between biological, environmental and social determinants affecting the capacity of an individual/population to respond to different scenarios; (2) health should be measured by the characteristics affecting the vulnerability and resilience of the animals and their ecosystems; and 3) wildlife health is a dynamic human social construction based on social expectations and scientific knowledge (Stephen 2013, 2014; Wittrock et al.
J. Pe´rez-Flores et al.
2019). In t
Data Loading...
