Movement behavior of terrestrial Tapirus in the Amazonia Colombiana
PhD(c) Tania González1, Dr Dolors Armenteras1
1Grupo de Investigación en Ecología del Paisaje y Modelación de Ecosistemas-ECOLMOD. Departamento de Biología, Universidad Nacional de Colombia., Bogotá, Colombia
Abstract:
Currently, human activities have a highly negative impact over biodiversity, contributing to the extinction of species populations, due to its effects over migration, movement, and other important ecological processes to survival. Tapirus terrestris is one of the most affected species by habitat transformation and overhunting. The conserve regions of the Amazon represent ideal places to comprehend the movement and infer the behavior of tapirs in their natural environment. This assessment analyzed the movement patterns of one lowland tapir (T. terrestris) at the middle part of the Caquetá river at the Colombian amazon. We assessed if the movement pattern is influenced by the resources availability using a spatial and temporal dynamic methodological approximation that considers the autocorrelation of location data. The results showed the complexity of the tapir´s movement, where the individual exhibited explorative and food search movements, which were statistically different based in the estimate velocity variation, the Brownian movement variance, the BCPA (behavioral change point analysis) analysis and the utilization distribution (UD). It was observed that the spatial usage of the tapirs, in terms of movement paths, presented an analog relation with the resources (canangucho and natural salt lick) availability and that this animal tended to use the same paths to perform the trips. We believe this work is highly relevant owing to the current lack of knowledge of tropical mammal movement ecology. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time the movement of a big mammal is analyzed in the Colombian Amazon.
Biography:
My name is Tania González, currently I am a PhD student at National University of Colombia, where also I did my master’s and major in biology. For more than six years I have been part of the Landscape Ecology and Ecosystem Modelling laboratory, where I have been working as a researcher assistant in several projects and collaborating with several peer review papers about ecosystems and Colombian fauna, deforestation, degradation, effects of fire, amongst others.
My focus area in the lab is Landscape Ecology applied to Conservation Biology, the last 3 years I worked with tapirs in the Colombian amazon, one of the most threaten mammal species in the Neotropical region. I did an assessment over the movement ecology, which is a relevant research for the management and conservation of this mammal. For my PhD my research is focus on the effects of fire over the mammal community dynamics and structure inside landscapes that have been and are under the influence of this disturbance in the Colombian Orinoquia. At the lab, we believe this kind of research is paramount to understand the fire ecological role over the plants and animal’s communities, also is imperative for the development of suitable management and conservation strategies and tools for the areas affected by this disturbance.