One thousand jaguars in Bolivia's Chaco? Camera trapping in Kaa-Iya National Park

Maffei, Cuellar, and Noss applied jaguar camera-trap capture-recapture in the dry Chaco forest of Bolivia's Kaa-Iya National Park, one of the largest protected areas in the region. From individually identified jaguars they estimated local density and extrapolated a park-wide population, suggesting the area could hold roughly a thousand jaguars, a figure underscoring the conservation importance of large dry-forest reserves. The study extended camera-trap jaguar monitoring beyond rainforest into seasonally dry ecosystems and demonstrated the value of camera surveys for landscape-scale population assessment. It is a frequently cited early jaguar density study and helped build the network of comparable estimates that later informed range-wide jaguar conservation planning across the Americas.