Abstract
Coyotes (Canis latrans) have established populations in most major urban centers across North America. While the risk of attacks on humans or their pets is low, the presence of carnivores in areas with high human use has resulted in increased public concern. Having a clearer understanding of which animals are more likely to interact with humans and when interactions are more likely to occur will help mitigate human-carnivore conflicts. Despite clear broad-scale patterns of human avoidance, human-coyote interactions occur most frequently in residential areas. Our purpose was to determine if use of residential areas varied consistently across individuals or time. We used locations from GPS collars deployed on 14 coyotes in the Greater Toronto Area, Ontario, Canada from 2012 to 2017 to fit a step selection function. Average (±SE) home range size estimates were 17.3 ± 4.6 km2 for resident coyotes and 102.8 ± 32.9 km2 for non-residents. We found that coyotes used natural areas more (β = 0.07, SE = 0.02, p < 0.0001), and roads (β = −0.50, SE = 0.13, p < 0.0001) and residential areas (β = −0.79, SE = 0.21, p = 0.0001) less during the day than at night. We also found that coyotes were more likely to use residential areas in the breeding season from January to April (β = 0.69, SE = 0.20, p = 0.0007) and the pup rearing season from May to August (β = 0.54, SE = 0.13, p < 0.0001) than in the dispersal season from September to December. Lastly, we found that resident coyotes were less likely to use residential areas than non-resident coyotes (β = −1.13, SE = 0.26, p < 0.0001). As far as we are aware, our study is the first to identify the seasons when coyotes are more likely to use residential areas. The seasonal patterns in habitat use that we observed reflect patterns that have been previously reported for human-coyote conflicts. Our results demonstrate that reducing the availability of anthropogenic food sources in residential areas, particularly in the winter and spring, should be a priority for managers aiming to reduce human-coyote conflict in urban areas.
Highlights
Human-wildlife conflict is often defined as wildlife induced damage to person or property (Dickman, 2010)
The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) consists of a range of landscapes from urban to rural, we focused our study primarily in the 10 municipalities that make up the urban and suburban core (Figure 1)
Like previous work on urban coyotes, we found that kernel density estimates provided home ranges that were highly fragmented and did not accurately represent coyote territories (Gehrt et al, 2009; Mitchell et al, 2015; Poessel et al, 2016)
Summary
Human-wildlife conflict is often defined as wildlife induced damage to person or property (Dickman, 2010). The protein-rich diet of mammalian carnivores can put them in direct competition for resources with humans, resulting in relatively higher rates of conflict with humans than observed for other mammal species (Treves and Karanth, 2003). Extensive conversion of forests to agricultural land and urban development following European settlement of North America resulted in range contractions for many mammalian carnivores (Woodroffe, 2000; Laliberte and Ripple, 2004). Habituation to humans, through intentional or unintentional feeding, is widely considered to be one of the main driving forces behind human-carnivore conflict (Albert and Bowyer, 1991; Newsome et al, 2015b). Human-wildlife conflicts are more likely to occur when carnivores are in poor health (Towns et al, 2009; Murray et al, 2015a), relying on more anthropogenic food sources (White and Gehrt, 2009; Lukasik and Alexander, 2011; Murray et al, 2015b), or within areas with poor habitat quality (Magle et al, 2014; Poessel et al, 2017a)
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