Terrestrial mammal assemblages in protected and human impacted areas in Northern Brazilian Amazonia

Abstract

Mammal communities in the vicinity of human settlements are often subject to subsistence hunting and retaliatory killings. We used fourteen digital camera traps equipped with infrared triggers to sample the medium-sized and large mammal communities for ca. 34 (-1.64) days per site. Diversity was measured as both Shannon entropy and Fager's number of moves (NMS), and dominance was quantified using the Berger-Parker index. We used Kruskall-Wallis tests to investigate if there were statistically significant differences in richness, diversity and dominance among the sites. At an overall sampling effort of 1,946 trap days we recorded 216 independent observations of a total of 20 species belonging to 17 genera and 15 families. Richness and diversity appeared to be determined by forest structure, since, independent of the level of human impact, the richest areas were those closest to the ombrophilous forests of southern Guyana shield, closest to central Amazonia, whereas the poorest were at those sites closest to the vegetation mosaics of central Guyana shield. The disappearance of Tayassu pecari from the impacted areas as well as higher relative abundances in the protected areas, albeit not significant, foresees a possible bleak future for the mammalian assemblages in the near future.