ABSTRACT
The maned wolf, which is practically endemic to the cerrado, persists today in what is a largely transformed and fragmented landscape. More than half the cerrado’s 2 million km2 has been converted into pasture, cropland, and other uses in the past 40 years and both the total amount and annual rate of clearing in the cerrado are greater than those in the Brazilian Amazon (Klink and Machado 2005). Less than 4% of the maned wolves’ global range overlaps with an existing or proposed Categories I-III nature reserve (calculated in a geographic information system (GIS) with data from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature [IUCN 2009] and IUCN & the World Conservation Monitoring Centre [UNEP-WCMC 2010]). Incentives for Brazil to expand its area of land under cultivation for bioethanol production are placing additional pressures on the region, which has traditionally been a major producer of soybeans. Determining the occurrence of the maned wolf outside the protected areas and their likelihood of persisting in an agricultural complex is of utmost priority in planning for the maned wolves’ long-term conservation (Rodden et al. 2004).
