Establishing a Baseline Mammal Presence In and Around Costa Rica’s Talamanca Mountains of La Amistad International Park

Despite thousands of hectares of reforestation in Costa Rica, the landscape across the country remains fragmented by patches of large-scale commercial plantations and human communities. These patchy areas have a lack of suitable habitat and prey, meaning there is very little gene flow within meta populations of many mammal & predator species. This study aims to establish a baseline for mammal presence and diversity in the Las Tablas protected zone in order to better inform conservation and habitat restoration efforts. In a camera trap study conducted from January 2023 - May 2023, 37 non-baited cameras were placed across a study area of 328 square kilometers. Sites were selected using a stratified study design, with cameras deployed in forest, farm, and fragment habitat. A total of 839 independent videos captured 29 species of mammals and large-bodied ground birds from 10 different taxa. Videos were analyzed using the Sanderson Method (Harris et al. 2010), for relative abundance, naive occupancy, and absence-presence matrices. White-nosed coati (Nasua narica) had both the highest relative abundance and naive occupancy. Pearson’s correlation used to analyze the relationship between species richness at a site against camera effort as well as different landscape covariates (distance to national park border, distance to a riparian corridor, and patch size) showed effort and patch size to be the strongest predictor of a site’s richness. Shannon-weiner alpha diversity indices were calculated for the three different landscape types. Forest land types had the highest diversity indices while fragments had the lowest. This research provides a comprehensive baseline for mammal presence and diversity to better inform habitat restoration and jaguar conservation efforts in the Las Tablas region.