干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Jaguars (Panthera onca) remain virtually unstudied in the desert environments at the northern extent of their range. Historic sightings from the United States indicate a declining population of resident jaguars from the late 1800s into the 1940s, after which only occasional jaguars were reported until the present. After 2 sightings of jaguars in 1996, we established a camera monitoring program in southeastern Arizona. From March 2001 to July 2007, we maintained 9-44 trail cameras and conducted opportunistic track surveys. We documented 2 adult males and a possible 3rd unidentified jaguar with 69 photographs and 28 sets of tracks. One jaguar, originally photographed in 1996, was resighted 64 times during 2004-2007. This >= 13-year-old male used habitats from the Sonoran lowland desert at 877 m above sea level to pine-oak woodlands at 1,577 m, and covered 1,359 km(2) in 2 mountain complexes. Despite speculation that recent sightings of jaguars in the United States represented dispersing transients on sporadic forays from Mexico, we documented jaguars in Arizona frequently, continuously, and year-round, and videotaped several scent-marking behaviors, indicating the residency of adult jaguars within Arizona. We outline the importance of maintaining cross-border connectivity for long-term survival of the wide-ranging and thinly distributed binational population of jaguars. We recommend further research and we stress the fragmentation consequences of the proposed United States-Mexico border fence to the northernmost jaguar population, and particularly to jaguars in the United States.