Elusive deer occurrences at the Atlantic Forest: 20 years of surveys

Abstract

The Atlantic Forest, a hotspot for biodiversity conservation, harbours five forest deer species (Mazama spp.). Due to their elusiveness, there is a severe scarcity of occurrence data to support ecological studies and conservation planning. Thus, we assembled an occurrence dataset of Atlantic Forest deer with reliable taxonomic information aggregating data from scat and camera traps surveys, and opportunistic data collection over the last 20 years. From 2002 to 2019, we surveyed 77 protected areas using scats detection dogs and genetically identifying the faecal samples. We successfully identified 1,147 out of 1,450 collected samples. From 2000 to 2020, we sampled six protected areas in 92 sampling points with 13,328 camera trap days of sampling effort. In addition, we established an active search for potential contributors within the scientific community and environmental consultants since 2010, offering a taxonomic identification service for camera traps images, and biological field-collected samples. With our efforts, we assembled a dataset with 1,456 records of forest deer occurrence at the Atlantic Forest. Of these records, 494 are from M. americana, 350 from M. bororo, 309 from M. gouazoubira, 268 from M. nana and 35 from M. nemorivaga. The faecal sampling was the most predominant method in these records (n = 1043) followed by photographs from camera traps (n = 388); both methods represent 98.2% of our dataset records. Most of the records (79.5%) in the dataset are inside protected areas (n = 1,130). Our dataset is the most comprehensive source of information on Neotropical forest deer occurrence to date.