Abstract
Compared with the rapid expansion across Europe, the golden jackal colonization of Italy is still limited and slow. No study focused on the habitat selection or landscape connectivity for this species was performed in Italy; thus, the potential distribution and dispersal patterns in the country remain unknown. Our objectives were to evaluate the suitability of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region (north-eastern Italy) for the golden jackal, as well as to identify the ecological corridors connecting the areas currently occupied by the species. Corridors modelling allowed us both to hypothesize the dispersal dynamics occurring in the study region and to identify possible obstacles to future range expansion. We surveyed golden jackal presence in two study areas, covering an area of 500 km2, from March 2017 to February 2018. Using collected data, we modelled the species home-range scale habitat suitability based on an ensemble modelling approach. Subsequently, a habitat suitability prediction at a finer scale was used to estimate landscape resistance, starting from which, we modelled dispersal corridors among areas currently occupied by the species using a factorial least cost path and a cumulative resistant kernel approach. Our results indicated a moderate potential for large parts of the study region to support the occurrence of golden jackal family groups, whose presence seems to be mainly driven by the presence of wide areas covered by broadleaved forests and shrublands and by the absence of wide intensive agricultural areas. The predicted connectivity networks showed that three main permeable corridors are likely to connect golden jackal occurrence areas within the study region, while all the other corridors are characterized by a very low path density. Both the habitat selection and connectivity analyses showed a strong negative impact of the intensive cultivated plain on species stable presence and movement providing critical information for the conservation of the golden jackal in Italy.
Highlights
The golden jackal (Canis aureus) is a native species of the Balkan Peninsula (Kryštufek et al 1997) and its historic distribution was mainly restricted along the Mediterranean and the Black Sea coasts (Trouwborst et al 2015; Krofel 2018)
Among the single species distribution models performed at the home-range spatial scale, the generalized linear model (GLM) had the lowest performance in predicting habitat suitability, while the generalized boosted model (GBM) had the highest (Table 4)
The ensemble model showed an excellent performance in predicting golden jackal occurrence (AUC = 0.964)
Summary
The golden jackal (Canis aureus) is a native species of the Balkan Peninsula (Kryštufek et al 1997) and its historic distribution was mainly restricted along the Mediterranean and the Black Sea coasts (Trouwborst et al 2015; Krofel 2018). Possible additional factors include abundant and accessible anthropogenic food resources (Lapini et al 2014), changes in land use and wildlife management (Markov 2012; Krofel et al 2017), and possibly climate changes (Fabbri et al 2014). Thanks to the great adaptability and the opportunistic feeding habits, the species inhabits a wide variety of habitats in different climatic areas of Europe, such as Mediterranean coastal vegetation, continental mixed forests, and marshlands (Ranc et al 2018). Given the great variability of occupied habitats, only a few factors seem to influence the jackal habitat use, i.e. the availability of food resources and the presence of vegetated areas to be used as shelter and denning (Jhala and Moehlman 2004; Borkowski et al 2011); according to the available knowledge, golden jackals are mainly associated with shrub vegetation and heterogeneous agricultural landscapes (Giannatos 2004; Šálek et al 2013)
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