When the imperilled prevail: monitoring terrestrial mammals with camera traps in a private protected area from the Central Andes of Colombia

Abstract Leveraging data on mammal diversity helps to implement conservation actions to promote ecosystem integrity, and camera traps are useful tools in such a task, especially in global biodiversity hotspots. We quantified medium and large-sized mammal diversity and activity in a private reserve recovering from cattle-ranched degraded land in the Central Andes of Colombia. We installed 30 camera traps (9.1 km 2 ) and accumulated 10,817 trap-nights between September 2023 and December 2024 to detect 16 species of mammals, including domestic dogs. Threatened species such as Tapirus pinchaque , Leopardus pardinoides and Nasua olivacea were representative mammals in the survey, detected in 97–100 % of stations (33 % of species detected were threatened with extinction). Diversity was high compared to similar landscapes, and the survey effort detected 99–100 % of the large and medium-size mammal assemblage. The diel niche of eleven of the 16 species detected was cathemeral (46 %), followed by diurnal (36 %), and nocturnal (18 %). We have demonstrated the value of private protected areas established in degraded lands to safeguard a representative mammal community from the Andean cloud forests of Colombia. Presence of dogs with their potential to interact negatively with native medium and large-sized mammals stresses the need to implement management actions on their populations.