A continental-wide decline of occupancy and diversity in five Neotropical carnivores

Abstract

The Neotropics are a global biodiversity hotspot that has undergone dramatic land use changes over the last decades. However, a temporal perspective on the continental-wide distributions of species in this region is still missing. To unveil it, we model the entire area of occupancy of five Neotropical carnivore species at two time periods (2000–2013 and 2014–2021) using integrated species distribution models (ISDMs) in a Bayesian framework. The carnivores are the jaguarundi (Herpailurus yagouaroundi), margay (Leopardus wiedii), maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus), tayra (Eira barbara), and giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). We mapped the temporal change, the areas where gains and losses accumulated for all species (hotspots of change) and calculated the temporal species turnover and change in spatial turnover. We show that (1) most carnivore species have declined their area of occupancy (i.e., range size) in the last two decades, (2) their diversity has decreased over time, mostly in the Chaco region, and (3) that hotspots of fast species composition turnover are in Chaco, the Caatinga region, and northwest of Mexico. We discuss how these newly identified hotspots of change overlap with regions of well-known and pronounced land use transformation. These estimated patterns of overall decline are alarming, more so given that four out of the five species had been classified as not threatened by IUCN. The official global threat status of these species may need to be re-evaluated. All this would be invisible if standard forecasts, local expert knowledge, or static threat criteria, such as range size, were used. We thus provide a new approach to evaluate past species range dynamics based on multiple lines of evidence, which can be employed over more species in the future, particularly in under-sampled regions.