Data from: Study "Lowland tapirs, Tapirus terrestris, in Southern Brazil"

Background: Animal movement is a key ecological process that is tightly coupled to local environmental conditions. While agriculture, urbanisation, and transportation infrastructure are critical to human socio-economic improvement, these have spurred substantial changes in animal movement across the globe with potential impacts on fitness and survival. Notably, however, human disturbance can have differential effects across species, and responses to human activities are thus largely taxa and context specific. As human disturbance is only expected to worsen over the next decade it is critical to better understand how species respond to human disturbance in order to develop effective, case-specific conservation strategies. Methods: Here, we use an extensive telemetry dataset collected over 22 years to fill a critical knowledge gap in the movement ecology of lowland tapirs (Tapirus terrestris) across areas of varying human disturbance within three biomes in southern Brazil: the Pantanal, Cerrado, and Atlantic Forest. Results: From these data we found that the mean home range size across all monitored tapirs was 8.31 km2 (95% CI 6.53–10.42), with no evidence that home range sizes differed between sexes nor age groups. Interestingly, although the Atlantic Forest, Cerrado, and Pantanal vary substantially in habitat composition, levels of human disturbance, and tapir population densities, we found that lowland tapir movement behaviour and space use were consistent across all three biomes. Human disturbance also had no detectable effect on lowland tapir movement. Lowland tapirs living in the most altered habitats we monitored exhibited movement behaviour that was comparable to that of tapirs living in a near pristine environment. Conclusions: Contrary to our expectations, although we observed individual variability in lowland tapir space use and movement, human impacts on the landscape also had no measurable effect on their movement. Lowland tapir movement behaviour thus appears to exhibit very little phenotypic plasticity in response to human disturbance. Crucially, the lack of any detectable response to anthropogenic disturbance suggests that human modified habitats risk being ecological traps for tapirs and this information should be factored into conservation actions and species management aimed towards protecting lowland tapir populations.

研究背景：动物运动是与局域环境条件紧密耦合的核心生态过程。农业、城市化与交通基础设施虽对人类社会经济发展至关重要，但它们在全球范围内引发了动物运动模式的显著改变，进而可能对动物的适合度与生存产生潜在影响。然而值得注意的是，人类干扰对不同物种的影响存在分化，因此动物对人类活动的响应在很大程度上取决于类群与具体情境。鉴于未来十年人类干扰程度只会持续加剧，深入理解物种对人类干扰的响应机制，对于制定针对性的有效保护策略至关重要。

研究方法：本研究依托历时22年收集的大规模遥测数据集，填补了巴西南部潘塔纳尔（Pantanal）、塞拉多（Cerrado）与大西洋森林（Atlantic Forest）三种生物群落内、不同人类干扰程度区域下低地貘（Tapirus terrestris）运动生态学相关的关键认知空白。

研究结果：基于上述数据，我们发现所有监测个体的平均家域面积为8.31 km²（95%置信区间：6.53~10.42），未检测到家域面积存在性别或年龄组间的显著差异。值得关注的是，尽管大西洋森林、塞拉多与潘塔纳尔的生境组成、人类干扰水平以及低地貘种群密度均存在显著差异，但本研究显示低地貘的运动行为与空间利用模式在三种生物群落中保持一致。此外，人类干扰对低地貘的运动未产生可检测到的影响：即便在我们监测到的受干扰程度最高的生境中，低地貘的运动行为也与近乎原始环境中的个体无显著差异。

研究结论：与我们的预期相悖，尽管我们观测到低地貘的空间利用与运动行为存在个体间变异，但景观尺度的人类活动未对其运动产生可测量的影响。由此可见，低地貘的运动行为在应对人类干扰时表现出极低的表型可塑性。至关重要的是，由于未检测到任何针对人为干扰的响应，这提示人类改造生境可能成为低地貘的生态陷阱，相关结论应纳入针对低地貘种群保护的保护行动与物种管理方案中。