PROJECT
The Pantanal floodplain and bordering Cerrado highlands in central-western Brazil provide continental-scale ecosystem services and contain an extraordinary level of biodiversity. Both biomes are recognized internationally for their conservation importance, the Pantanal for its largely-intact seasonal wetlands, savannas and forests and the Cerrado for its highly-threatened biodiverse savanna-forests, home to many endemic species and thousands of headwater streams that supply the Pantanal. Despite their conservation significance, both biomes also comprise an economically-important production landscape. More than 95% of the Brazilian portions consist of privately-held lands, the majority on the floodplain being large-holder cattle ranches, and in the highlands, a mixture of large-holder cattle ranches, crop plantations and small-holder farms.
For the private property-dominated Pantanal and Cerrado, the principal threat is environmentally-harmful land-use behavior characterized by ongoing conversion of native habitat to planted pasture and crops, followed by use of harmful and inefficient land-use practices, which rapidly degrade newly-established agricultural areas and drive additional conversions. Current estimates show that >60% of the Cerrado highlands and >15% of the Pantanal floodplain have been converted, resulting in an array of environmental consequences, including losses of biodiversity and ecosystem services, increased CO2 emissions, accelerated erosion and siltation of streams, habitat fragmentation and increased hunting and human-wildlife conflicts.
To address these threats, the Peccary Project has worked for more than 18 years with rural communities and regional collaborators in the Pantanal and Cerrado to develop and implement: (i) proven sustainable land-use practices that are profitable alternatives to native habitat conversions and inefficient practices on private lands, (ii) municipal-scale land-use management planning that scales up use of conservation, restoration, and improved land use measures, and (iii) community outreach that promotes behavior and attitude changes, advancing improved land use and environmental protection. In parallel, we monitored how key wildlife species and environments respond to different levels of land-use related disturbance on private properties.
Monitoring has shown that white-lipped peccaries (WLPs), the main focus of the proposed project, were highly vulnerable to native habitat conversion, fragmentation, and illegal hunting, which makes them uniquely suited to guide conservation efforts in the Pantanal and Cerrado. They are frugivorous (fruit-eating), wide-ranging species that use a diversity of native habitats and are the only forest-associated ungulates in the Neotropics that form large herds (30 to 100 individuals). Documented extirpations of WLPs from large conservation units across their biogeographical range (Mexico to Argentina) have shown that protected areas alone are not adequate to ensure the survival of the species. Their IUCN species status is vulnerable for their full geographic range, but it varies across Brazilian biomes from critically endangered in the highly-fragmented Atlantic Forest (which extends into the project region) to endangered in the Cerrado, to vulnerable in the relatively intact Pantanal. This illustrates their sensitivity to native habitat conversion and their value as bioindicators of intact native habitats.
The importance of WLPs to other wildlife species that are also dependent on intact native habitat, e.g., brocket deer, giant armadillos, bush dogs and jaguar, stems from the critical nature of their multiple ecological roles, i.e., as apex seed predators and dispersers, ecosystem engineers of forest vegetation composition, and prey for large cats, like jaguar. In fact, studies have shown that removing them from the ecosystem causes a cascade of negative impacts, including loss of jaguar populations, loss of fruit resources, increases in pest rodents and associated diseases, and an overall impoverishment of forest plant and wildlife communities.
