Prerequisites for coexistence: human pressure and refuge habitat availability shape continental-scale habitat use patterns of a large carnivore

Abstract

Context Adjustments in habitat use by large carnivores can be a key factor facilitating their coexistence with people in shared landscapes. Landscape composition might be a key factor determining how large carnivores can adapt to occurring alongside humans, yet broad-scale analyses investigating adjustments of habitat use across large gradients of human pressure and landscape composition are lacking. Objectives Here, we investigate adjustments in habitat use by Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) in response to varying availability of refuge habitats (i.e., forests and rugged terrain) and human landscape modification. Methods Using a large tracking dataset including 434 individuals from seven populations, we assess functional responses in lynx habitat use across two spatial scales, testing for variation by sex, daytime, and season. Results We found that lynx use refuge habitats more intensively with increasing landscape modification across spatial scales, selecting forests most strongly in otherwise open landscapes and rugged terrain in mountainous regions. Moreover, higher forest availability enabled lynx to place their home ranges in more human-modified landscapes. Human pressure and refuge habitat availability also shaped temporal patterns of lynx habitat use, with lynx increasing refuge habitat use and reducing their use of human-modified areas during periods of high exposure (daytime) or high vulnerability (postnatal period) to human pressure. Conclusions Our findings suggest a remarkable adaptive capacity of lynx towards human pressure and underline the importance of refuge habitats across scales for enabling coexistence between large carnivores and people. More broadly, we highlight that the composition of landscapes determines how large carnivores can adapt to human pressure and thus play an important role shaping large carnivore habitat use and distributions.

Integrating animal tracking datasets at a continental scale for mapping Eurasian lynx habitat

“…adjustments of habitat use with varying habitat availability also termed functional responses; Aarts et al, 2013), whereas spatial proximity alone is often a poor proxy of model transferability (Yates et al, 2018). Our results thus indicate that functional responses might be a main factor explaining variation in habitat selection by lynx across Europe, which is well in line with recent results highlighting adjustments by lynx across gradients of human pressure and landscape composition (Oeser et al, 2023). While previous studies have highlighted the usefulness of including predictor variables at multiple scales for capturing functional responses (Aldossari et al, 2022;Matthiopoulos et al, 2011;Paton & Matthiopoulos, 2016), as in our global environment approach, our comparison showed that combining habitat maps from local models can also achieve good performance.…”

Spatiotemporal patterns of lion (Panthera leo) space use in ahuman–wildlifesystem

“…Community‐based conservation organizations already practice sub‐diurnal conflict mitigation strategies, such as enhanced livestock guarding between dusk and dawn when lions move closer to agro‐pastoral areas (Oriol‐Cotterill, Macdonald, et al, 2015). These practices could be expanded to increase the availability of vegetative patches that act as spatiotemporal refuge within a landscape of fear (Palmer et al, 2022), thereby reprieving lions from daytime anthropogenic risk (sensu Oeser et al, 2023; Schuette et al, 2013). Increased vegetative cover could also bolster lion hunting success, potentially enhancing prey accessibility at night and lessening the need to consume livestock.…”

Shining a light on elusive lynx: Density estimation of three Eurasian lynx populations in Ukraine and Belarus

“…Therefore, the exact placement of our arrays in the wider landscape may mean the MCPs did not always enclose the most probable areas to detect lynx because the wetlands, rivers and landscape heterogeneity within the array may push the activity centre clusters away from the centre of arrays. To overcome these aspects in future surveys, we recommend using habitat suitability maps (Oeser et al., 2023), simulating different sampling designs (Ash et al., 2020) or employing pre‐season surveys to inform camera trap placements.…”

“…Suitable habitat for lynx in Europe's fragmented landscapes is constrained by human disturbance, which lynx avoid (Oeser et al., 2023; Ripari et al., 2022). Reintroduced lynx populations in Central Europe also exhibit genome‐wide diversity loss, requiring the immediate need to increase connectivity between populations (Mueller et al., 2022; Papp et al., 2020; Premier et al., 2021).…”