CAMERA TRAPPING AS A BASIS FOR MULTI-SPECIES ASSESSMENT OF  CORRIDOR HEALTH AND CONNECTIVITY IN HONDURAS

Travis Wade King

Human-dominated tropical landscapes often serve as components of multi-national conservation efforts. However, the factors shaping species persistence, trophic structure, and connectivity in these fragmented systems remain poorly understood. Here, we examine how habitat fragmentation and human pressure influence the medium to large terrestrial vertebrate community across northern Honduras, a highly disturbed Neotropical landscape critical to regional conservation. Using broad-scale camera-trap data and Bayesian Royle-Nichols multi-species occupancy models as a shared analytical framework, we assess the drivers of vertebrate retention in remnant forest patches, the persistence of apex carnivore effects on community structure (e.g., trophic release) across a human disturbance gradient, and the effectiveness of jaguars (Panthera onca) as an umbrella species for multi-species connectivity conservation. Fragmentation alone was insufficient to explain community patterns. Human pressure predominated at the community-level, while fragmentation remained important at the species-level, though its effects were mediated by species-specific traits. Apex carnivores continued to structure subsets of the community, but their effects were generally weaker than those of human disturbance. Further, apex carnivore effects were not expressed as a uniform trophic-release pattern. Instead, apex-associated responses formed a mosaic of predictable response archetypes across the human disturbance gradient. For some taxa, apex carnivore suppression remained strong even where human disturbance was high. For others, trophic release was context-dependent, being most detectable at lower disturbance sites and weakened as human pressure increased. Likewise, jaguars retained a substantial but bounded connectivity conservation role. Jaguar served as a ‘raincoat’ for the most vulnerable, forest-dependent, and disturbance-sensitive species, but was not a full community umbrella. Similarly, jaguar-focused conservation actions (e.g., the pre-existing jaguar corridor and our modeled corridor variants) were most effective when implemented as corridor networks that retain core habitat anchors that act as an umbrella for forest-dependent taxa. These results indicate that effective conservation in fragmented tropical landscapes requires accounting for fragmentation and human pressures to support species retention, trophic interactions, and movement. More broadly, this dissertation provides the first nationwide, multi-species assessment of terrestrial vertebrate retention and connectivity in Honduras. This work provides a critical baseline for conservation planning and long-term monitoring in fragmented tropical landscapes.

CAMERA TRAPPING AS A BASIS FOR MULTI-SPECIES ASSESSMENT OF CORRIDOR HEALTH AND CONNECTIVITY IN HONDURAS

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