Abstract

Urban areas are associated with high levels of habitat fragmentation. For some terrestrial species with limited climbing abilities, property boundaries can pose a significant problem by limiting access to residential gardens. The West European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus) has declined markedly in the UK but is commonly found in areas of human habitation, including residential gardens. ‘Hedgehog Street’ is a public engagement campaign aimed at recruiting volunteers (‘Hedgehog Champions’) to create access points (‘hedgehog highways’) across garden boundaries to improve habitat connectivity. In this study, we used a series of questionnaire surveys to explore motivations for and obstacles to the creation of highways. Householders were more likely to have created a highway if they were already aware of the Hedgehog Street campaign, if their garden contained a high number of wildlife-friendly features and if they considered watching wildlife to be important. Hedgehog Champions created, on average, 1.69 highways each with 52.0% creating none; this would equate to an estimated >120,000 across all registered Champions. In comparison, 6.1–29.8% of non-Champions stated that they had made a highway. However, most highways had been created in boundaries that could already be traversed via naturally occurring holes: only 11.4% of garden boundaries could be traversed, and 3.2% of gardens accessed, just via a hedgehog highway. In addition, only 5.0% of gardens were considered totally inaccessible to hedgehogs. The most common reasons cited for not having made a highway were that householders’ gardens were already accessible to hedgehogs followed by concerns relating to boundary ownership and / or communicating with neighbours. Future studies need to identify strategies for overcoming these obstacles to maximize citizen engagement, particularly with those householders who are not innately “wildlife-friendly”, and to quantify the degree to which networks of highways affect patterns of individual movement and, ultimately, populations.

Highlights

  • Urbanisation is a major form of anthropogenic land-use change and is typically associated with a decline in biological diversity [1,2,3,4]

  • Such declines are effects of the destruction, degradation and fragmentation of natural / semi-natural habitats and the presence of a range of characteristics associated with urban areas that many species cannot tolerate [4, 5]

  • Ecological communities in urban areas are often dominated by generalist species [6, 7], with some occurring at higher densities in towns and cities than in natural habitats [8,9,10,11,12]

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Summary

Introduction

Urbanisation is a major form of anthropogenic land-use change and is typically associated with a decline in biological diversity [1,2,3,4]. Such declines are effects of the destruction, degradation and fragmentation of natural / semi-natural habitats and the presence of a range of characteristics associated with urban areas that many species cannot tolerate [4, 5]. Residential gardens offer potentially substantive conservation benefits, yet present considerable challenges such as the possible need to engage large numbers of householders for these benefits to be realised [26, 27]

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