Socio‐spatial organization of urban stone martens

Abstract

Stone martens Martes foina are common occupants of urban environments across continental Europe. We predicted that like other 'urban adapters', urban stone martens should exhibit smaller home ranges, more extensive home-range overlap and higher population densities than their rural counterparts. We radio-tracked 13 stone martens (10 females, three males) in two towns in southern Luxembourg during a 2-year period, in order to investigate nocturnal ranging behaviour. All martens maintained stable, year-round territories almost wholly within the urban perimeter of the respective study towns. Socio-spatial organization was based on intra-sexual territoriality. Territories (100% minimum convex polygon) were small in size (males: 112.6 AE 24.8 ha; females: 37.0 AE 22.2 ha) and population densities moderately high (4.7-5.8 adults km À2 ) by comparison with previous studies of rural populations. We conclude that although stone martens are clearly well adapted to urban conditions, urbanization has surprisingly little impact on their socio-spatial organization by comparison with its effects on other mesocarnivores. This apparent inflexibility in the spacing patterns of stone martens lends support to the view that spacing in martens (Martes spp.) is a predominantly phylogenetic trait that is under limited environmental influence.

Changes in Mediterranean mesocarnivore communities along urban and ex-urban gradients

“…Therefore, the species showed no apparent selection in relation to urbanization. In other European regions the stone marten is highly synanthrophic (Libois andWaecheter 1991, Broekhuizen andMuskens, 2000;Herr et al, 2009;Tóth et al, 2009), something that has been not observed in a previous research in the Iberian region of the Mediterranean (Virgós and Casanovas, 1998;Virgós and García, 2002). Therefore, the stone marten seems to be more flexible in this region to different types of landscapes than its Centroeuropean counterparts (see also Virgós et al, 2000;Tóth et al, 2009).…”

Habitat urbanization and its effects on birds

“…raccoons, mustelids; Prange et al 2003, Herr et al 2008, TÓth et al 2011, Červinka et al 2014 are frequently higher in urban environments compared to adjacent, more natural habitats (Rodewald et al , Šálek et al 2015. The results of growing number of monitoring studies demonstrate that many predatory species have the ability to adapt to and gain from human altered landscapes and have increased their urban populations recently.…”

Do well-connected landscapes promote road-related mortality?

“…The models were based on four assumptions: (1) Occupancy of smaller and more isolated montado patches is influenced by the effective distance to larger montado source areas, and this effect will become evident over time; (2) effective distances are dependent on different land use patterns with different resistance values; (3) roads are not likely to serve as barriers to movement; stone marten are known to cross roads (Grilo et al 2009) and travel along streets in urban areas (Herr et al 2009); and (4) water bodies have a negligible effect on carnivore movements due to their small size and limited number in the study area. We therefore assumed that different land cover types influenced stone marten movements and chose not to include roads or water bodies as landscape elements.…”