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

0551830 - ÚBO 2023 RIV NL eng J - Journal Article
Ripari, L. - Premier, J. - Belotti, E. - Bluhm, H. - Breitenmoser-Würsten, C. - Bufka, L. - Červený, J. - Drouet-Hoguet, N. - Fuxjäger, C. - Jędrzejewski, W. - Kont, R. - Koubek, Petr - Kowalczyk, R. - Krofel, M. - Krojerová-Prokešová, Jarmila - Molinari-Jobin, A. - Okarma, H. - Oliveira, T. - Remm, J. - Schmidt, K. - Zimmermann, F. - Kramer-Schadt, S. - Heurich, M.
Human disturbance is the most limiting factor driving habitat selection of a large carnivore throughout Continental Europe.
Biological Conservation. Roč. 266, FEB (2022), č. článku 109446. ISSN 0006-3207. E-ISSN 1873-2917
Institutional support: RVO:68081766
Keywords : Habitat selection * Human disturbance * Large carnivore * Multi-scale * Carnivore ecology * Landscape cohabitation
OECD category: Biodiversity conservation
Impact factor: 5.9, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320721004985?via%3Dihub

Habitat 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.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0327075