Abstract
Finding balance between the needs of people and wildlife is an essential component of planning sustainable landscapes. Because mammals make up a diverse and ecologically important taxon with varying responses to human disturbance, we used representative mammal species to examine how alternative land-use policies might affect their habitats and distributions in the near future. We used wildlife detections from camera traps at 1591 locations along a large-scale urban to wild gradient in northern Virginia, to create occupancy models which determined land cover relationships and the drivers of contemporary mammal distributions. From the 15 species detected, we classified five representative species into two groups based on their responses to human development; sensitive species (American black bears and bobcats) and synanthropic species (red foxes, domestic cats, and white-tailed deer). We then used the habitat models for the representative species to predict their distributions under four future planning scenarios based on strategic versus reactive planning and high or low human population growth. The distributions of sensitive species did not shrink drastically under any scenario, whereas the distributions of synanthropic species increased in response to anthropogenic development, but the magnitude of the response varied based on the projected rate of human population growth. This is likely because most sensitive species are dependent on large, protected public lands in the region, and the majority of projected habitat losses should occur in non-protected private lands. These findings illustrate the importance of public protected lands in mitigating range loss due to land use changes, and the potential positive impact of strategic planning in further mitigating mammalian diversity loss in private lands.
Highlights
Effective land planning must balance the needs of people and the natural world [1], because land cover change and habitat loss are among the leading causes of biodiversity loss [2]
We evaluated occupancy models for all 15 species, but excluded 10 species from further analyses beyond the occupancy model comparisons
Bears and bobcats were positively associated with natural land covers and were positively associated with increasing distances from anthropogenic land covers of development, roads, and crops
Summary
Effective land planning must balance the needs of people and the natural world [1], because land cover change and habitat loss are among the leading causes of biodiversity loss [2]. Despite the increasing availability of wildlife data, few studies have integrated these data to map the distributions of mammal species in regions undergoing expansive land changes [12,16] These projected species distribution models can be used to predict range shifts in response to future landscape scenarios, such as those projected under climate change [17,18]. Contemporary biodiversity data provide valuable snapshots of mammal distributions, but they have not been applied to projections of land cover change to forecast community distributions in the future. These predictions would be informative to stakeholders, as they coordinate and select planning policies to preserve biodiversity and their associated ecosystem services
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