The Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project is a non-invasive study designed to detect jaguars in the remote mountains along the border between southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. The information gained from this study will be invaluable to government agencies from the United States and Mexico to make sound management decisions concerning conservation of the jaguar and its habitat.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

The Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project has captured twenty six photographs of jaguars in the wilds of southern Arizona using remote-sensing cameras. This majestic cat was thought to have been extinct in the US since the mid-1900s. Amazingly, until these photographs were taken, this elusive cat had been sighted in the US only four times in the last three decades.

The jaguar (Panthera onca), the largest cat in the western hemisphere, is at great risk throughout its range due to habitat loss and constant persecution by livestock owners. The species was extirpated from the Southwest at the turn of the last century; however, we have recently found jaguars again in remote portions of the Sierra Madre range in northern Mexico and the Sky Islands region of southern Arizona and New Mexico. This sparked hope for the cats return to its historic range in the southwestern United States. We are seeking funding to support research on the distribution of these magnificent cats along the U.S. / Mexico border. This information is critical to the protection of suitable habitat and corridors allowing jaguars to move between the southwestern U.S. and populations in Mexico.

The Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project is a non-invasive study designed to detect jaguars in the remote mountains along the border between southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. This is the first step in identifying jaguar travel corridors and suitable jaguar habitat in the southwestern United States. Remote sensing cameras have been placed in strategic locations in several small mountain ranges and riparian areas along the United States/Mexico border. Cameras were placed along the most probable travel routes throughout the study site based on sign present as well as the existing knowledge of the local landowners, ranchers, biologists and professional hunters. These cameras detect heat in motion and photograph any animals that pass by. They record dates and times and allow us to study the behavior and ecology of the animals using non-invasive techniques.

The information gained from this study will be invaluable to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Arizona and New Mexico Game and Fish Departments and the Instituto de Medio Ambiental del Estado de Sonora (IMADES) to make sound management decisions concerning conservation of the jaguar and its habitat. This project is fundamental in identifying core areas of suitable habitat and travel corridors that must be protected for the jaguar. This information will prove instrumental in jaguar conservation in the northern portion of its range and will help allow the jaguar to return to its home in the American Southwest. This work will require large-scale efforts collecting solid ecological data to identify critical habitat as well as working effectively with land owners, government agencies, and conservation organizations. These collaborative efforts will assist people who live in and near critical habitat in developing alternative ways to balance their economic and cultural concerns with an understanding of the importance of holistic conservation ecology.

At the Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project we share the vision that saving species like the jaguar results in protecting a tremendous amount of biodiversity that might otherwise become extinct. High profile carnivores such as jaguars require extensive, connected, relatively unaltered habitat, therefore the conservation of these animals results in the protection of large wild areas. This provides an umbrella of habitat protection for many species that are often smaller, less charismatic, and therefore difficult to protect. Our current knowledge of the natural processes that maintain biodiversity shows that ecological study of large carnivores as indicator species contributes to maintaining and improving environmental quality at the ecosystem level. Management practices that target large carnivores not only protect large areas of the natural environment, but also insure complete, healthy ecosystems.

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

The goal of this project is to gather solid scientific data on the Borderland jaguars in order to provide accurate information to state and federal agencies and conservation groups from Arizona, New Mexico and Sonora, Mexico, so that informed and effective conservation plans can be established and implemented to preserve the Borderlands jaguar. The Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project has successfully documented wild jaguars residing in the state of Arizona. These findings mark a milestone in jaguar conservation and give momentum and direction towards sound management plans to conserve a truly magnificent cat that might otherwise slip away unnoticed to extinction. We hope to expand our survey efforts to more comprehensively cover the extent of the area used by Borderland jaguars to identify and define the habitat that must be protected for their recovery in the United States. The results of our monitoring project will guide policy makers within the Jaguar Conservation Team in their June 2006 decision regarding Critical Habitat designation for the jaguar.

The Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project has maintained remote camera stations and track/scat transects in the mountains along the Mexico border since March 2001. We began with just 5 cameras and now have several dozen camera monitoring sites and transects across three mountain ranges. Approximately 3050 identifiable mammal photos have been taken to date. Our transects have generated hundreds of data points and carnivore scat have been submitted for DNA analysis. We will continue current monitoring and plan to further expand our survey efforts to cover a larger area with these non-invasive monitoring techniques. Exact location names and coordinates will remain confidential as requested by the Arizona Game and Fish Department to ensure protection of jaguars in the study site.

Like most large carnivores, jaguars require home ranges large enough to provide them with sufficient prey year round. While jaguars in tropical habitats of Central America and South America have been fairly well studied, very little is known about jaguars at the northern extent of their range in the Sonoran Desert of the Borderlands region. In the tropics, where prey is abundant, jaguars can have small home ranges and high population densities. However, the scarce food sources of the desert environment may cause jaguars to maintain extensive territories, potentially well over 100 square kilometers. We will expand our survey efforts over a large enough area to identify occupied jaguar habitat and estimate potentially suitable habitat in the United States. Increased monitoring in this region is critical in documenting the full distribution of jaguars in Arizona and is the first step in determining jaguar habitat requirements, identifying critical habitat, and collecting ecologically relevant data that will be applied towards formulating effective land management protocols to insure a future for this magnificent endangered species in the American Southwest.

The jaguars secretive nature makes it one of the most difficult animals to study in the wild. Remote sensing trip-camera photography, track surveys and genetic fecal DNA analysis are non-invasive methods commonly used to study wildlife worldwide. These methods are especially useful for research of extremely elusive and secretive species as well as monitoring remote and inaccessible areas. The jaguar is especially suited for non-invasive study via remote cameras because their spot patterns are unique to each jaguar and allow us to identify individuals by their photograph. The ability to distinguish each individual is extremely valuable in mapping home ranges and habitat utilization, and photographic capture-recapture population estimates are possible. Genotyping of fecal DNA is a recent technique used to identify scats collected in the field to species and even individual. Therefore, remote sensing trip-camera monitoring and genotyping scats is critical for preliminary ecological research that will document the presence of the jaguar in the United States and identify occupied and suitable habitat and travel corridors.

CONSERVATION IMPACTS