Many new towns were established along the Belém-Brasília Highway following its construction in the 1960s. One was Paragominas, in the northeastern region of the state of Pará (Fig. 1). Large areas of forest in this region were cut for cattle pasture during the 1970s; and due to the depletion of timber resources in southern Brazil, in the 1980s Paragominas also became an important logging center, with the highest concentration of sawmills anywhere in Brazilian Amazonia. Today, timber is scarce in the region, and the sawmills have been moved to new frontiers, although Paragominas still remains an important commercial center for the industry.
Although the remaining fragments suffer from hunting and selective logging, some still maintain primate populations (Lopes and Ferrari, 2000). In this study I evaluate the effects of this land use model on primates in a forest fragment isolated since the late 1970s and composed of three different habitats (unlogged – UN, logged – LG and secondary forest – SF), and compare my results with other studies in the same region.