Passive acoustic monitoring as a tool for analyzing occupancy and spatiotemporal patterns of primates in the Atlantic Forest, Brazil

• Grant number: 24/10818-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: December 01, 2025
• End date: December 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Ecology
• Principal Investigator: Milton Cezar Ribeiro
• Grantee: Aron Silvarolli Fernandes
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências (IB). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Rio Claro. Rio Claro , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The Atlantic Forest, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet, has undergone a drastic reduction of its original cover, with only about 22.9% remaining today. This fragmentation, mostly composed of small secondary forest patches, threatens the conservation of several groups, including primates, of which 26 species occur in the region, 19 of them endemic. Species distribution is shaped by local habitat characteristics, landscape configuration, and abiotic factors such as altitude, while their decline compromises key ecological processes such as seed dispersal and forest regeneration. In this context, passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) emerges as a promising tool for primate ecology and conservation, as it enables non-invasive recording of their spatio-temporal vocalization patterns in dense and acoustic complex tropical forests. This study has three main objectives: i) most studied taxa/regions; PAM applications; recorder setups; future potential; current limitations. (ii) to analyze the spatio-temporal patterns of primate vocalizations, identifying in which environments and at what times they occur, as well as their daily rate and variation; and (iii) to investigate, through occupancy models, which variables best predict primate presence in the fragmented forest remnants of the Cantareira-Mantiqueira corridor.