Small mammal declines: predicting who & why

Andrew Van Eck

Habitat fragmentation is a major cause of species losses. When habitats are anthropogenically fragmented, hunting pressure increases because hunters can more easily access previously remote habitats. This correlation of fragmentation and hunting hinders our ability to understand the impact of each on wildlife within fragmented habitats. As a result, the effects of fragmentation could be inflated or we may fail to find significant synergistic impacts. To disentangle the relative effects of hunting and fragmentation, this project studied medium and large mammals within the Chiquitano forests of southeastern Bolivia with camera-traps and track-plots.