An introduction to neotropical carnivores

The Neotropics is rich in biodiversity and arguably contains some of the leastunderstood and most understudied predators of the world. Jaguars and other carnivoresrepresent the highest trophic levels within Neotropical areas that can markedly altervertebrate communities and indirectly plant communities-leading to greater overallbiodiversity.Their elusive nature and diffuse distributions within difficult to access areas maketheir data extremely difficult, time consuming and expensive to obtain. Thus, weconsidered it essential to bring together the world's leading Neotropical carnivorespecialists to compile their most recent data altogether in a single publication that wouldbe available to conservation managers of Neotropical areas.This chapter describes the book's main themes (molecular population genetics,evolutionary biology, and biological conservation) and how it presents Neotropicalcarnivore data in different categories such as by guild (all Neotropical carnivores), byfamily, and when appropriate, by species.The remaining part of this chapter describes specific species of interest (jaguar,jaguarundi, guigna, pampas cat, Andean mountain cat, ocelot, Andean bear, Giant Otter,sechuran fox, culpeo fox, kinkajou and the tayra) to which we have added significantamounts of new data and that are further discussed in succeeding chapters.