Abundance/density case study: Jaguars in the Americas

Abstract

Since camera traps were first used to estimate the density of tiger Panthera tigris populations in India (Karanth 1995; see also Karanth et al. this volume), this methodology has been widely used to study a variety of species: leopards Panthera pardus (Henschel and Ray 2003; Karanth et al. this volume; Kostyria et al. 2003), snow leopards Panthera uncia (Jackson et al. 2006), pumas Puma concolor (Kelly et al. 2008), ocelots Leopardus pardalis (Di Bitetti et al. 2006, 2008; Dillon and Kelly 2007, 2008; Maffei et al. 2005; Trolle and Kéry 2003, 2005), and Geoffroy's cats Oncifelis geoffroyi (Cuéllar et al. 2006; Pereira et al. 2006). However, jaguars Panthera onca have probably received the most attention with respect to using camera traps to estimate the abundance and density of populations that cover the species' entire Neotropical range (Cullen et al. 2005; Kelly 2003; Maffei et al. 2004b; Miller and Miller 2005; Silver et al. 2004; Soisalo and Cavalcanti 2006). To date, at least 83 different camera trapping efforts have been carried out to survey jaguars, from southern Arizona in the north to northern Argentina in the south. In this chapter, we describe the details of this methodology - summarizing information on survey design and methodologies, results, data manipulation and analyses - and discuss how future surveys can be refined to allow for more robust inferences. © Springer 2011.