首页|Human disturbance is the most limiting factor driving habitat selection of a large carnivore throughout Continental Europe

Human disturbance is the most limiting factor driving habitat selection of a large carnivore throughout Continental Europe

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  • NSTL
  • Elsevier
? 2022 Elsevier LtdHabitat selection is a multi-scale process driven by trade-offs between benefits, such as resource abundance, and disadvantages, such as the avoidance of risk. The latter includes human disturbances, to which large carnivores, with their large spatial requirements, are especially sensitive. We investigated the ecological processes underlying multi-scale habitat selection of a large carnivore, namely Eurasian lynx, across European landscapes characterized by different levels of human modification. Using a unique dataset of 125 lynx from 9 study sites across Europe, we compared used and available locations within landscape and home-range scales using a novel Mixed Effect randomForest approach, while considering environmental predictors as proxies for human disturbances and environmental resources. At the landscape scale, lynx avoided roads and human settlements, while at the home-range scale natural landscape features associated with shelter and prey abundance were more important. The results showed sex was of relatively low variable importance for lynx's general habitat selection behaviour. We found increasingly homogeneous responses across study sites with finer selection scales, suggesting that study site differences determined coarse selection, while utilization of resources at the finer selection scale was broadly universal. Thereby describing lynx's requirement, if not preference, for heterogeneous forests and shelter from human disturbances and implying that regional differences in coarse-scale selection are driven by availability rather than preference. These results provide crucial information for conserving this species in human-dominated landscapes, as well as for the first time, to our knowledge, generalising habitat selection behaviour of a large carnivore species at a continental scale.

Carnivore ecologyHabitat selectionHuman disturbanceLandscape cohabitationLarge carnivoreMulti-scale

Belotti E.、Cerveny J.、Bufka L.、Bluhm H.、Breitenmoser-Wursten C.、Molinari-Jobin A.、Zimmermann F.、Drouet-Hoguet N.、Fuxjager C.、Jedrzejewski W.、Kowalczyk R.、Schmidt K.、Kont R.、Premier J.、Remm J.、Koubek P.、Krojerova-Prokesova J.、Krofel M.、Oliveira T.、Okarma H.、Ripari L.、Heurich M.、Kramer-Schadt S.

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Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences Czech University of Life Sciences

Department of Research and Nature Protection ?umava National Park Administration

Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin Geography Department

Stiftung KORA

Equipe Loup-Lynx - Office Fran?ais de la Biodiversité

Luchsbeauftragter Nationalpark Kalkalpen Nationalpark Zentrum Molln

Centro de Ecología Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas (IVIC)

Mammal Research Institute Polish Academy of Sciences

Department of Zoology Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences University of Tartu

Chair of Wildlife Ecology and Wildlife Management Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources University of Freiburg

Institute of Vertebrate Biology of the Czech Academy of Sciences

University of Ljubljana Biotechnical Faculty Department for Forestry

Institute of Nature Conservation Polish Academy of Sciences

Department of Life Sciences and System Biology University of Turin

Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW)

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2022

10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109446

Biological Conservation

Biological Conservation

SCI
ISSN：0006-3207
年,卷(期)：2022.266
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