Abstract
The interactions between animals and their environment vary across species, regions, but also with gender. Sex‐specific relations between individuals and the ecosystem may entail different behavioral choices and be expressed through different patterns of habitat use. Regardless, only rarely sex‐specific traits are addressed in ecological modeling approaches. The European wildcat (Felis silvestris silvestris) is a species of conservation concern in Europe, with a highly fragmented and declining distribution across most of its range. We assessed sex‐specific habitat selection patterns for the European wildcat, at the landscape and home range levels, across its Iberian biogeographic distribution using a multipopulation approach. We developed resource selection functions in a use‐availability framework using radio‐telemetry data from five wildcat populations. At the landscape level, we observed that, while both genders preferentially established home ranges in areas close to broadleaf forests and far from humanized areas, females selected mid‐range elevation areas with some topographic complexity, whereas males used lowland areas. At the home range level, both females and males selected areas dominated by scrublands or broadleaf forests, but habitat features were less important at this level. The strength of association to habitat features was higher for females at both spatial levels, suggesting a tendency to select habitats with higher quality that can grant them enhanced access to shelter and feeding resources. Based on our results, we hypothesize that sex‐biased behavioral patterns may contribute to the resilience of wildcats’ genetic integrity through influencing the directionality of hybridization with domestic cats. Our study provides information about European wildcats’ habitat use in an Iberian context, relevant for the implementation of conservation plans, and highlights the ecological relevance of considering sex‐related differences in environmental preferences.
Highlights
Human activities have widespread impacts across the environment and generally have disruptive effects in the ecosystems causing substantial threats to species diversity and conservation (Pimm et al, 2014)
We develop resource selection functions (RSFs) at the landscape and home range levels across several populations within the range of the Iberian wildcat BGU
We investigated habitat selection at two levels—landscape and home range—following the scalar hierarchy proposed by Johnson (1980), and examined selection at both levels using resource selection functions (RSFs; Manly et al, 2004)
Summary
Human activities have widespread impacts across the environment and generally have disruptive effects in the ecosystems causing substantial threats to species diversity and conservation (Pimm et al, 2014). Different space use patterns could influence hybridization directionality (defined as the relative skewness in the frequency of interbreeding events between two groups under reciprocal hybridization; Bettles, Docker, Dufour, & Heath, 2005), and the incorporation of hybrids into the wild population This situation was reported for canid species—grey wolf x dog (Godinho et al, 2011; Leonard, Echegaray, Randi, & Vilà, 2013), or red wolf x coyote (Bohling & Waits, 2015)—, where matings between female wolves and male dogs, and between female red wolves and male coyotes, were overwhelmingly more abundant than the opposite. In southwestern Europe, which can inform conservation strategies aimed at reversing the declining trends of this small felid
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