Revealing the unknown world of the endangered Lear's macaw using GPS-tracking data: identification of critical habitats for conservation

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Understanding space use and home range is essential for the conservation planning of threatened species as it helps to assess the suitability, extent, and placement of conservation areas that are imperative for species survival and protection. The Endangered Lear’s macaw (Anodorhynchus leari), a highly mobile frugivore, feeding specialist and endemic to Brazil’s Caatinga dry forest, faces ongoing habitat degradation. In this study, we identified critical habitats by examining the spatial distribution of feeding, resting, and roosting sites and investigating home range size and its temporal variation. We GPS-tracked juvenile macaws and estimated fortnightly home ranges with autocorrelated kernel density estimators. We assessed if extrinsic factors, such as tagging site, seasonality, rainfall and vegetation productivity (proxies for food availability) influenced home range size. Our findings reveal considerable variation in home ranges, with an average of 850.15 km² (1.24-8,549.48 km²). Home ranges expanded significantly during the dry season (mean 1,097.06 km²), representing a 2.14-fold increase from the wet season. We also found that site and season primarily drove home range size, while vegetation productivity and rainfall had limited influence. This suggests that macaw movements may respond to complex interactions between rainfall, landscape composition and configuration, and food availability rather than direct resource fluctuations. This is the first study to estimate home ranges for Lear’s macaw, providing critical insights into its spatial ecology. Our findings underscore the importance of preserving key roosting and feeding areas and highlight the need for continuous monitoring to address threats posed by environmental changes and human activity. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2W06Z Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Caatinga, conservation, GPS tracking, habitat use, home range, Lear’s macaw, licuri palm, Parrot Published: 2025-08-31 20:19 CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: There are no conflicts of interest. Data and Code Availability Statement: The data that supported our findings is stored in Movebank Data Repository hosted by Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (movebank.org, “(EBD) Anodorhynchus leari (Lear’s Macaw) Study”, study ID 322731302). The code on GitHub for the analysis in R for this manuscript is available at https://github.com/fernandariera/Learsmacaw.git Language: English