{"id":2208666,"date":"2026-10-24T06:00:20","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T04:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/?p=2208666"},"modified":"2026-10-17T14:22:48","modified_gmt":"2026-10-17T12:22:48","slug":"researchers-tracked-172-jaguars-across-the-americas-what-they-found-could-help-protect-the-big-cats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/researchers-tracked-172-jaguars-across-the-americas-what-they-found-could-help-protect-the-big-cats\/","title":{"rendered":"Researchers tracked 172 jaguars across the Americas. What they found could help protect the big cats"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a map of Central and South America in a new research paper that shows the core areas for the continents\u2019 only big cats, jaguars, and it reveals much about how these apex predators are faring.<\/p>\n

Western Brazil and parts of eastern Peru, in the heart of the Amazon Basin, are deep red, showing this to be the absolute stronghold for the species, and from here the colours go to orange, yellow, blue and dark blue, spreading out like the rings on an archery target.<\/p>\n

The map has been modelled using the movements of 172 GPS-collared jaguars, and it\u2019s both good and bad news.<\/p>\n

The good news is that the largest and highest-ranked core area covers a massive 6.5 million km2 \u2013\u00a0an expanse almost as large as the whole of Australia \u2013\u00a0and includes the Amazon, the Llanos of Colombia and Venezuela, the Pantanal and the Chaco.<\/p>\n

The bad news is that everywhere else, including most of Central America, northern South America and eastern Brazil, is increasingly fragmented.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn general, I would say that our results are quite positive,\u201d says Sam Cushman, the biology department\u2019s chair of science at Southern Denmark University (SDU) and a joint senior author of the paper published in\u00a0Global Change Biology<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main population is concentrated in the Amazon, but when we exclude that and look around at other populations, the situation is not great, and lots of them are at high risk of becoming locally extinct.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"Jaguar
Ranking of core habitat areas for jaguars across the species’ current range. The strength of core areas is expressed as density of movement. The side maps highlight the 10 highest-ranked core areas numbered by priority. Credit: Guilherme Costa Alvarenga<\/figcaption><\/figure>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another key contributor to the paper, Carol Sartor, a postdoctoral ecologist also at SDU, says these other, more vulnerable populations are important, not just because jaguars are top predators and therefore have a profound impact on all ecosystems, but also because jaguars outside of the heartlands represent significant genetic diversity.<\/p>\n

That genetic diversity is manifested in the way jaguars are able to live in these different biomes, from the wetland-dominated Pantanal where caiman are their main prey, to the flooded forests of the Amazon where they climb trees and hunt monkeys and sloths.<\/p>\n

They also inhabit Brazil\u2019s caatinga, a dry, scrubby biome where they predate peccaries, brocket deer and armadillos.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we let these small populations, such as those in the Atlantic Forest, go, we lose all that genetic information,\u201d Sartor says.<\/p>\n