Authors: Semper-Pascual, Asunción; Bischof, Richard;Milleret, Cyril;Beaudrot, Lydia;Vallejo-Vargas, Andrea F.;Ahumada, Jorge A.;Akampurira, Emmanuel ;Bitariho, Robert ;Espinosa, Santiago;Jansen, Patrick A;

The structure of forest mammal communities appears surprisingly consistent across the tropics, presumably due to convergent evolution in similar environments. We do not yet know whether this consistency extends to mammal occupancy, and this is particularly the case when assessing habitat specialization. Here we ask whether species characteristics predict occupancy patterns and, if so, whether these relationships are consistent across biogeographic regions. We assessed how feeding guild, body mass and ecological specialization relate to mammal occupancy in protected areas across the tropics. We used standardized camera-trap data (1,002 camera-trap locations and 10 years) and a hierarchical Bayesian occupancy model. Herbivores consistently had the highest occupancy. However, only in the Neotropics did we detect a significant effect of mass on occupancy: large mammals had lower occupancy than medium-size mammals. Importantly, habitat specialists generally had a higher occupancy than generalists, though this was reversed in the Indo-Malayan sites. We conclude that considering habitat specialization is key to understanding variation in mammal occupancy across regions, and that protected areas may be crucial for increasing specialist occupancy. However, this is not the case in the Indo-Malayan region, where specialists had the lowest occupancy, likely reflecting the higher anthropogenic pressure that protected areas experience there.