We, predators: humans, apex predators and their preys in the Atlantic Forest trophic cascades

• Ano de defesa: 2016
• Autor(a) principal: Perilli, Miriam Lucia Lages
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Viçosa
• Palavras-chave em Português: Mamíferos - Mata; Ecossistemas - Modelos estatísticos; Níveis tróficos; Ecologia
• Link de acesso: https://locus.ufv.br//handle/123456789/31855; https://doi.org/10.47328/ufvbbt.2021.184

Tropical forests represent Earth's richest biodiversity ecosystems and yet are severely threatened by anthropogenic effects. Humans major trends affecting tropical forests are habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation of remaining forest. When large vertebrate species are able to persist in fragmented landscapes, the remaining habitat and the reorganization of species biotic interactions may influence their distribution and abundance. Yet, it is difficult to separate those effects from the direct impact of humans. Therefore, in addition to habitat modification we must also account for the direct impact of vertebrate harvest by humans in Neotropical forests. In the following chapters, we observed the current picture of medium and large mammals’ distribution in one the core forest remnants and proposed to incorporate humans as a “hyperkeystone” species in the Atlantic forest food webs. In Chapter I, we described the spatio-temporal dynamics of meso and large mammals, using a joint-species distribution model to the data recorded by camera-traps. We observed that the medium and large terrestrial mammal community varied in their responses to environmental conditions and showed patterns of co- occurrences that may indicate shared environmental niches or intra-guild interactions across time and space. In Chapter II, we proposed a conceptual model with four likely scenarios for the role of apex predators and human beings in natural interaction webs. We concluded that poaching has outsized impacts on the food webs and must not be considered an “invisible” threat. Thus, from the ecological and conservationist perspective, we must account for our own species not as external separate entity, but as an active part of the ecosystems that have direct impacts on trophic interactions.