We used contingency tables (Chi-square goodness-of-fit-tests)
complemented by residual analysis to assess if the radio-collared
sloths used the habitats according to their availabilities. First, we
contrasted the number of location fixes on each major habitat type
inside the MCPs (swamp/pasture, cabruca, early secondary forest
and late secondary forest) with the expected frequencies of
fixes based on the availability of these habitats in the MCPs. We
pooled the swamp with pasture as all fixes falling in pasture were
in fact in the very edge between pasture and swamp vegetation.
In a second Chi-square we contrasted the observed frequency of
fixes with the expected value based on habitat availability in a
buffer area surrounding the home ranges of the three sloths. To
calculate the width of this buffer area we measured the largest
distances between fixes inside each individual home range and
averaged them. The resulting width (487 m) encompassed an area
of 214.7 ha (6.8 times larger than the combined area of the three
MCPs). Although this wide buffer may include land-use types differing
from the immediate study area, a narrower band would not
be representative of the larger landscape context. These tests were
performed using BioEstat version 5.0, a free statistical software
available at Instituto de Desenvolvimento Sustentável Mamirauá