Title
Small mammal assemblages in a disturbed tropical landscape at Pozuzo, Peru
Date Issued
01 January 2010
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Apartado Postal 11-0205
Publisher(s)
Elsevier B.V.
Abstract
Deforestation in the Peruvian pre-montane forests has increased alarmingly in recent years. Particularly, fragmentation in these forests takes place against a background of very extensive continuous forest. Until now, no studies have detailed how Peruvian small mammals responded to forest fragmentation. In this paper, we report the results of an assessment of nonvolant small mammal fauna in forest remnants (one large fragment and one small fragment) and cattle pasture in a disturbed landscape at Pozuzo, formerly a pre-montane tropical forest in central Peru. In each forest remnant, we quantify habitat parameters and identified small mammals to know if there is a relationship between forest remnant size or microhabitat structure and small mammal assemblages. In addition, we investigated the influence of habitat structure on the presence of small mammal species. We did not find any evidence that habitat structure in large fragment was greater than small fragment. Actually, both forest remnants presented habitat features typical of forests subject to higher levels of disturbance. We found that abundance of small trees (10 - 19 cm DBH) was positively associated with the presence of Marmosops noctivagus, but negatively with the presence of Oecomys bicolor. Likewise, the presence of the arboreal Rhipidomys leucodactylus was associated with the abundance of larger trees (DBH > 50 cm). We recorded 12 small mammal species in large fragment, 9 in small fragment and 3 in cattle pasture. No significant differences were found in species richness between both fragments, but marsupial abundance in the small fragment was greater than large fragment. At Pozuzo, we recorded 9 species restricted to forest habitat and 3 to forest and cattle pastures. However, it is necessary to assess more fragments to improve our knowledge about species survival in this landscape. © 2008 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Säugetierkunde.
Start page
83
End page
91
Volume
75
Issue
1
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ecología
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-72149125609
Source
Mammalian Biology
ISSN of the container
1616-5047
Sponsor(s)
We thank H. Zarza for suggestions on an earlier version of this manuscript. Three anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments on the manuscript. This study was supported by PROTERRA. We thank all assistants that provided their help in the field. Thanks are extended to the Instituto Nacional de Recursos Naturales (INRENA) for permission to work at Pozuzo. The Departamento de Mastozoologia (MUSM) facilitated the field equipment. V. Pacheco, S. Solari and L. Luna helped in the taxonomic identification of some marsupial and rodent species. Landsat image was obtained from the Global Land Cover Facility ( http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/index.html ). This is a contribution of the Wildlife Trust Alliance and BIOCONCIENCIA, A.C.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus