Abstract
Throughout their recent recovery in several industrialized countries, large carnivores have had to cope with a changed landscape dominated by human infrastructure. Population growth depends on the ability of individuals to adapt to these changes by making use of new habitat features and at the same time to avoid increased risks of mortality associated with human infrastructure. We analyzed the summer movements of 19 GPS-collared resident wolves (Canis lupus L.) from 14 territories in Scandinavia in relation to roads. We used resource and step selection functions, including >12000 field-checked GPS-positions and 315 kill sites. Wolves displayed ambivalent responses to roads depending on the spatial scale, road type, time of day, behavioral state, and reproductive status. At the site scale (approximately 0.1 km2), they selected for roads when traveling, nearly doubling their travel speed. Breeding wolves moved the fastest. At the patch scale (10 km2), house density rather than road density was a significant negative predictor of wolf patch selection. At the home range scale (approximately 1000 km2), breeding wolves increased gravel road use with increasing road availability, although at a lower rate than expected. Wolves have adapted to use roads for ease of travel, but at the same time developed a cryptic behavior to avoid human encounters. This behavioral plasticity may have been important in allowing the successful recovery of wolf populations in industrialized countries. However, we emphasize the role of roads as a potential cause of increased human-caused mortality.
Highlights
Roads are man-made habitat features that are hardly comparable to any natural habitat: they are linear, have an open canopy, a hard surface, and often have parallel open-canopy strips with groundcover vegetation on both sides
Our study focused on the summer period because 1) all gravel roads are available for wolves and people as opposed to winter when only some parts of gravel roads are snow-ploughed, and 2) breeding wolves may be more constrained during this period when movements are restricted to denning or rendezvous sites
We have demonstrated that the behavioral response of Scan dinavian wolves to roads is a complex multi-factorial process dependent on time of day, road type, behavioral state, reproductive status, and spatial scale
Summary
Roads are man-made habitat features that are hardly comparable to any natural habitat: they are linear, have an open canopy, a hard surface, and often have parallel open-canopy strips with groundcover vegetation on both sides. They form a network causing fragmentation of natural habitats. Roads are among the most recent of man-made habitat alterations, having spread dramatically during the past century following the development of motor vehicles (Huston 2005). Reviews of ecological effects of roads on wildlife populations highlight the direct mortality caused by collisions with vehicles and the indirect alteration of individual behavior due to habitat loss, fragmentation, and increased human access (Forman and Alexander 1998; Coffin 2007; Fahrig and Rytwinski 2009; Benitez-Lopez et al 2010). Increased access implies higher human-caused disturbance and predation risk as perceived by wildlife, thereby linking the two main types of human impact, habitat alteration and hunting. Our study aims to explore this link and its consequences for the behavioral ecology of the wolf, a top predator which is currently re-covering in many European countries (Linnell et al 2005)
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