National parks offer large core habitat that is critical for conserving large cats, but national parks alone are not sufficient to sustain a connected and genetically healthy population. Smaller adjacent private reserves improve connectivity and increase habitat extent in areas outside these parks. Sustainable, low-impact ecotourism often incorporates private nature reserves, which can serve to create a matrix of interconnected protected areas, providing corridors to larger core habitat areas. Ecotourism areas often involve non-consumptive human use and conserve both primary and secondary forests.
One excellent example of such an operation is the Lapa Rios (Fig. 1) private nature reserve – 1,000 acres of mixed primary and secondary rainforest on the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, and a substantial percentage of the last remaining tropical lowland rainforest in Central America. Within one week of camera trapping here in April 2014, we captured photos of puma (Fig. 2;Puma concolor), and their preferred food source, the white-lipped peccary (Fig. 3; Tayassu pecari), locally known as chanchos de monte.
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