Research overview: jaguar resource selection across modified landscapes

Understanding how jaguars use human-modified landscapes is key to predicting their response to land-use and climate change. This overview surveys GPS-telemetry and resource-selection research showing how jaguars navigate mosaics of forest, ranchland, plantation, and rivers, which features they avoid, and how individual variation shapes their tolerance of disturbance. It reviews how such behavioral data inform connectivity models and corridor design across fragmented terrain. The synthesis frames movement ecology as the bridge between static habitat maps and the dynamic reality of cats moving through changing landscapes, explaining why telemetry studies are central to forecasting how jaguars will, or will not, traverse the increasingly converted and climate-altered country between protected cores.