RESEARCH ARTICLE Rapid Assessment of Distribution of Wildlife and Human Activities for Prioritizing Conservation Actions in a Patagonian Landscape

Large landscapes encompassing reserves and areas with other human uses are necessary for conservation of many species. Generating information for conservation planning over such landscapes may be expensive and time-consuming, though resources for conserva-tion are generally limited and conservation is often urgent. We developed a sign-based oc-cupancy survey to help prioritize conservation interventions by simultaneously assessing the distribution of 3 species, the lesser rhea, guanaco, and mara, and their association with human activities in a 20,000-km2 landscape in the northern Patagonian steppe. We used a single-season occupancy model with spatial rather than temporal replication of surveys in order to reduce costs of multiple visits to sites. We used covariates related to detectability, environmental factors, and different human activities to identify the most plausible models of occupancy, and calculated importance weights of covariates from these models to evalu-ate relative impacts of human activities on each species. Abundance of goats had the stron-gest negative association with lesser rheas and guanacos, and road density with maras. With six months of fieldwork, our results provided initial hypotheses for adaptive conserva-tion interventions for each species. Addressing high livestock densities for rheas and gua-nacos, poaching by urban hunters for all three species, and hunting by rural people for rheas are priorities for conservation in this landscape. Our methodology provided new in-sights into the responses of these species, although low detection probabilities for maras in-dicate that the sampling scheme should be altered for future monitoring of this species. This method may be adapted for any large landscape where a rapid, objective means for priori-tizing conservation actions on multiple species is needed and data are scarce