From Natural to Human‐Dominated Seascapes: Habitat Loss for Guiana Dolphins Over Two Decades

ABSTRACT Changes in natural environments, such as coastal and marine zones, caused by human activities impact the quality of habitats and their inhabitants, ultimately jeopardising species conservation. As human activity is ever‐increasing, it is imperative to understand how multiple stressors, such as shipping, fisheries and pollution, affect marine animals. The Guiana dolphin is a cetacean susceptible to many anthropogenic stressors due to its coastal preference. As such, we assessed the consequences of human stressors for this species by comparing the probability of occurrence of a population in two time series, considered as past (1998–2007) and current (2017–2024) series. We modelled the probability of occurrence using environmental and anthropogenic data from both time series, comparing the response curves and importance of variables. We observed a change in the importance of variables, where in the past, chlorophyll concentration was more important to predict dolphins' habitat use, while in the current time series, distance to multiple anthropogenic stressors was more important. The models predicted a 6.84% increase in the number of pixels of occurrence over the years. However, 44.83% of these areas were predicted to have the lowest and low probabilities. Meanwhile, 49.61% of pixels decreased to a lower probability category, including the areas with the highest probabilities of occurrence (24.7% of pixels) that were now predicted as absences. We concluded that anthropogenic changes are affecting the habitats and distribution of the Guiana dolphin, highlighting the need for further evaluations of how human activities influence the conservation of biodiversity.