Record of Baird’s tapir Tapirus bairdii at the La Suerte Biological Field Station in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica.
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Conservation Biology, Zoology
- Keywords
- Baird's Tapir, Costa Rica, habitat loss, Caribbean Lowlands
- Copyright
- © 2018 Brandt et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Record of Baird’s tapir Tapirus bairdii at the La Suerte Biological Field Station in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27128v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27128v1
Abstract
Widely recognized as the largest terrestrial mammal in the Neotropics, the globally endangered, IUCN Red-listed, Baird’s tapir Tapirus bairdii has been in a continual decline due to habitat loss, localized hunting, and their low reproductive rates. Because of its ecological role, the loss of this species is likely to have a cascading effect on a number of species that are important to the ecological functioning of the remaining fragments of tropical forests across Central America. As efforts continue to identify regions where this species still persists throughout its known range, we report here a new record of T. bairdii in the Caribbean lowlands of northeast Costa Rica. Although T. bairdii may have historical existed in the region surrounding the field station, they were believed to be extirpated with only anecdotal reports suggesting their continued existence.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ. It has been submitted for publication in Tapir Conservation.