A comunidade de mamíferos de médio e grande porte da Reserva Biológica Sooretama, ES: a influência da BR-101 e outros fatores físicos e bióticos

Abstract

Roads are a major cause of habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation and are in most landscapes around the world. The construction of new highways is fundamental for socioeconomic development. However, the highways have mainly negative effects on adjacent habitats, thus affecting local communities. There is a global concern about vertebrate threats caused by the presence of highways and the urgent need for conservation strategies to mitigate or reduce impacts from a highway, especially those located in or near protected areas. Thus, it is important to identify impact levels and locations where the characteristics of the environment make the species potentially more vulnerable to roadkills and which are more susceptible to impact. In this sense, this dissertation was divided into two chapters with the aim of identifying the medium and large mammal community of the Sooretama Biological Reserve and to evaluate which species are most vulnerable to roadkill in relation to landscape characteristics and the use of drainage structures to cross the highway. We evaluated the mammal community from October 2016 to October 2017 through two sample designs with camera traps installed in the RBS based on a monitoring of the roadkills between the years 2010 and 2017 in the stretch of 25 km of highway BR -101 that crosses the forest fragment of the Linhares and Sooretama region. Our results indicated the presence of 30 species of medium and large mammals, including two domestic species. Of these, 13 are now threatened. The composition of mammals in the community was positively related to the structure of the vegetation and distance from the water resource. The distance from the BR-101 highway, however, did not affect the composition and distribution of the species in the RBS. Over the monitored period, we recorded 285 mammals hit by the cars by the 25 km stretch. Our results show that roadkills did not occur at random, but that the vegetation structure was one of the factors that had importance for the collisions to occur in a grouped way in certain points of the road. The results indicated that most of the species, although present inside the tunnels, do not use them to cross the highway, indicating that the tunnel structure is effective only for some of the species. The mammal community registered in the present study for RBS included large herbivores and carnivores, as well as endangered species and those already extinct in other Atlantic Forest sites. These results indicate the high degree of conservation that the reserve has for maintaining the biodiversity of mammals in the region. However, the BR-101 highway remains under constant threat to local forest species, whether due to recurrent roadkills or the isolation of some species in only a portion of the reserve