Impactos de mudanças climáticas e desmatamento na distribuição geográfica de Cebus kaapori (Primates: Cebidae) na Amazônia

Abstract

Climate change and deforestation are among the greatest threats to biodiversity. In the Amazon, the establishment of Protected Areas is an important tool to reduce the negative impacts of these threats, favoring the protection of biodiversity. Amazonia holds the largest number of primates in the world. Primates are highly sensitive to forest loss and habitat modification, which directly threatens the survival of their populations. The Ka’apor Capuchin Cebus kaapori is considered the rarest and most threatened primate species in the Amazon, and is classified as Critically Endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Here, we evaluated the impacts of climate change and deforestation on Cebus kaapori distribution area. We modeled the distribution of the species under current and future (2050) climates and overlapped these models with established protect areas as well as current forest cover and that expected for 2050 in two different economic scenarios acoording to a land-use model. We found that climate change might lead to up to 97% of loss of climatic suitable area for Cebus kaapori within the next 30 years. The situation worsens when considering current forest loss and future deforestation projections, both under a governance scenario and in under the business-as-usual scenario. We show that the restricted distribution of Cebus kaapori, coupled with likely high reduction in suitable areas for species occurrence, low coverage in protected areas and fragmentation of potential adaptive areas for occurrence in the future, might reduce species’ populations to an unviable level of survival in nature.