The Puma as an umbrella species for conserving Western Hemisphere Carnivores

A challenge for macroecological studies is collecting sufficient empirical data to study large-scale patterns of distribution or abundance. Comprehensive surveys for presence cannot be conducted at such large scales for most carnivores, including the puma. However, habitatsuitability models were recently developed to estimate the area of occupancy (i.e., presence), rather than just the extent of occurrence, within the geographic ranges of all terrestrial mammals. We used these models to measure the distribution of high-quality habitat within the geographic range of the puma, and evaluate the potential for the puma to serve as an umbrella species for carnivore conservation in the Western Hemisphere. The extent of the puma’s geographic range covered a total area of over 22 million km2, and 75% of that area was high-quality habitat. However, only 6% of this high-quality habitat occurred in protected areas. The puma has considerable potential to serve as an umbrella species. The puma’s high-quality habitat overlaps 75 ± 8% (mean ± SE) of the high-quality habitat of 11 sympatric felid species. Puma habitat supports more than double the mean species richness of mammalian carnivores (9.34) than unsuitable puma habitat (4.37). In addition to providing valuable life-history data for macroecological analyses, these models allow species co-occurrence patterns to be quickly estimated at a fine spatial resolution, which has historically been an impediment to evaluating the utility of umbrella species.