Abstract
Urbanization is one of the major forms of habitat alteration occurring at the present time. Although this is typically deleterious to biodiversity, some species flourish within these human-modified landscapes, potentially leading to negative and/or positive interactions between people and wildlife. Hence, up-to-date assessment of urban wildlife populations is important for developing appropriate management strategies. Surveying urban wildlife is limited by land partition and private ownership, rendering many common survey techniques difficult. Garnering public involvement is one solution, but this method is constrained by the inherent biases of non-standardised survey effort associated with voluntary participation. We used a television-led media approach to solicit national participation in an online sightings survey to investigate changes in the distribution of urban foxes in Great Britain and to explore relationships between urban features and fox occurrence and sightings density. Our results show that media-based approaches can generate a large national database on the current distribution of a recognisable species. Fox distribution in England and Wales has changed markedly within the last 25 years, with sightings submitted from 91% of urban areas previously predicted to support few or no foxes. Data were highly skewed with 90% of urban areas having <30 fox sightings per 1000 people km−2. The extent of total urban area was the only variable with a significant impact on both fox occurrence and sightings density in urban areas; longitude and percentage of public green urban space were respectively, significantly positively and negatively associated with sightings density only. Latitude, and distance to nearest neighbouring conurbation had no impact on either occurrence or sightings density. Given the limitations associated with this method, further investigations are needed to determine the association between sightings density and actual fox density, and variability of fox density within and between urban areas in Britain.
Highlights
The world is becoming increasingly urbanized to accommodate the growing human population [1]
We investigated whether the density of fox sightings reflected expected patterns in the relative density of urban fox populations based upon predictive models developed in the 1980s [29]
Akaike’s Information Criterion for small datasets (AICc) [61] was used to rank models and create a set of candidate models that best explained the data: we considered models that contributed to 95% of the cumulative weight as plausible and used model averaging across the set to estimate parameter values [58]
Summary
The world is becoming increasingly urbanized to accommodate the growing human population [1]. Carnivores considered to be ‘urban exploiters’ are typically medium-sized, dietary generalists that have high reproductive potential and are behaviourally flexible [8] [7]. Such species benefit from the increased availability of anthropogenic food sources and refugia [9], and can reach higher population densities in urban areas than in rural habitats [7] [10]. Contact with nature can have positive benefits for human health and well-being [19] [20] [21] and, in many parts of the world, urban residents seek to engage with the wildlife around them, for example, by providing food for garden visitors [9] [22]. Assessment of urban wildlife populations is important for monitoring their benefits and for conflict mitigation and resolution
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