Abstract
In recent years, the “forest-specialist” pine marten Martes martes has been reported to also occur also in largely fragmented, lowland landscapes of north-western Italy. The colonization of such an apparently unsuitable area provided the opportunity for investigating pine marten ecological requirements and predicting its potential south- and eastwards expansion. We collected available pine marten occurrence data in the flood plain of the River Po (N Italy) and relate them to 11 environmental variables by developing nine Species Distribution Models. To account for inter-model variability we used average ensemble predictions (EP). EP predicted a total of 482 suitable patches (8.31% of the total study area) for the pine marten. The main factors driving pine marten occurrence in the western River Po plain were the distance from watercourses and the distance from woods. EP suggested that the pine marten may further expand in the western lowland, whilst the negligible residual wood cover of large areas in the central and eastern plain makes the habitat unsuitable for the pine marten, except for some riparian corridors and the pine wood patches bordering the Adriatic coast. Based on our results, conservation strategies should seek to preserve remnant forest patches and enhance the functional connectivity provided by riparian corridors.
Highlights
As already noted by MacArthur in the early 1970s, distribution ranges are dynamic and their boundaries can fluctuate greatly as a consequence of both dispersal and temporal variation in environmental conditions [1]
Based on the resulting threshold value (416), ensemble predictions (EP) predicted a total of 482 suitable patches for the pine marten, occupying a total of 4366 km2 (8.31% of the total study area; Fig 2), with the most important variables related to the species’ occurrence being the distance from watercourses (38.1% contribution), distance from woods (37.8% contribution) and, to a lesser extent, habitat diversity (11.2% contribution) and distance from roads (10.7% contribution; Table 3)
The main role played by the distance from bodies of water clearly reflects the importance of riparian corridors for marten expansion in a landscape largely dominated by crops and urban areas
Summary
As already noted by MacArthur in the early 1970s, distribution ranges are dynamic and their boundaries can fluctuate greatly as a consequence of both dispersal and temporal variation in environmental conditions [1]. Range fluctuations generally occur over historical time periods, but they have recently been recorded to occur over short time scales due to introductions and environmental change [2, 3]
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