Spatial Aspects of Gardens Drive Ranging in Urban Foxes (Vulpes vulpes): The Resource Dispersion Hypothesis Revisited.

Bryony A Tolhurst,Francesca Cagnacci,Rowenna J Baker,Dawn M Scott

doi:10.3390/ani10071167

Bryony A Tolhurst, Francesca Cagnacci + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10071167

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Abstract

Red foxes are a well-established species of urban ecosystems in the UK and worldwide. Understanding the spatial ecology of foxes in urban landscapes is important for enhancement of urban biodiversity and effective disease management. The Resource Dispersion Hypothesis (RDH) holds that territory (home range) size is linked to distribution and richness of habitat patches such that aggregation of rich resources should be negatively associated with range size. Here, we tested the RDH on a sample of 20 red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) in the city of Brighton and Hove. We focused on residential garden areas, as foxes were associated with these in previous studies. We equipped 12 male and 8 female foxes with GPS collars recording at 15 min intervals during discrete seasons over four years. We regressed fox core area size against garden size, number of garden patches, and edge density within and between patches as extracted from GIS in a series of bivariate linear mixed models. We found that foxes used smaller core areas where gardens were large and well-connected and larger core areas where numerous, smaller gardens were fragmented by internal barriers (e.g., fences, walls) or bisected by other habitats such as managed grassland or built-up areas. Our findings confirm the RDH and help to inform future urban planning for wildlife.

Highlights

Increasing global expansion of urban areas typically has negative effects on biodiversity [1,2], yet a few species appear to benefit from human activities in towns and cities [3]
We explored the use of various common home range estimators that describe the utilization distribution (UD)—a probability density distribution of animal relocations in two-dimensional space
We Global Positioning System (GPS)-tracked a total of 20 foxes (8 vixens and 12 dog foxes) in four seasons over a period of four years across three housing density categories (Figure 1 and Table 2)

Summary

Introduction

Increasing global expansion of urban areas typically has negative effects on biodiversity [1,2], yet a few species appear to benefit from human activities in towns and cities [3]. Animals that fit this category are deemed “synurbic” and include red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) [4,5]. Urban foxes are excellent subjects for testing hypotheses on meso-carnivore space use due to their typically higher density relative to rural populations [18], territoriality, and habituation to humans [4]. In the South of England where most UK urban fox studies have been conducted, foxes occur at medium to high densities configured in small, contiguous or overlapping group territories (e.g., Oxford [19,20], Bristol [7,21], Brighton [22])

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