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

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F68081766%3A_____%2F22%3A00551830" target="_blank" >RIV/68081766:_____/22:00551830 - isvavai.cz</a>

Alternative codes found

RIV/62156489:43210/22:43920949 RIV/60460709:41320/22:94065

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320721004985?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" >https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320721004985?via%3Dihub</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109446" target="_blank" >10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109446</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

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

Original language description

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.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

10619 - Biodiversity conservation

Project

—

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2022

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Biological Conservation

ISSN

0006-3207

e-ISSN

1873-2917

Volume of the periodical

266

Issue of the periodical within the volume

FEB

Country of publishing house

NL - THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS

Number of pages

12

Pages from-to

109446

UT code for WoS article

000788103900018

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85122532613