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- Title
Black-tailed deer resource selection reveals some mechanisms behind the 'luxury effect' in urban wildlife.
- Authors
Fisher, Jason T; Fuller, Hugh W.; Hering, Adam; Frey, Sandra; Fisher, Alina C.
- Abstract
The global urban population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion people over the next 30 years. Yet the doubling of urban landscapes in the last decades have already led to habitat loss and concomitant impacts to biodiversity. Nonetheless urban landscapes remain important for wildlife, and multi-city analyses have revealed that wealthy urban areas house more biodiversity (species richness), a 'luxury effect'. We researched some of the mechanisms for the luxury effect for urban black-tailed deer, a species of increasing concern in urban landscapes across the northwestern Nearctic. We hypothesized that deer were capitalizing on anthropogenic resource subsidies occurring in affluent housing and supported by urban green spaces such as parks and golf courses. In 2018-19 we satellite-collared twenty deer in an affluent urban landscape in British Columbia, Canada, with 13-hr fix rates. We used generalized models in an information-theoretic framework to weigh evidence for competing hypotheses about the role of tree cover, productivity, public green spaces, and wealth in explaining deer selection. Wealth, manifesting as housing lot size, emerged as the dominant predictor of deer space-use, which is highly concentrated into very small home-ranges. Other landscape elements stemming from affluence, including golf courses and parklands, were also strongly selected by deer. We show post-colonization landscape conversion from dry semi-arid savannah to well-watered high-productivity landscapes is supporting deer, with ramifications for the rest of the biotic community. With urban landscapes becoming an increasingly important for biodiversity conservation, understanding these mechanisms and incorporating them into urban planning can help to promote wildlife-human coexistence.
- Subjects
BRITISH Columbia; MULE deer; URBAN animals; LUXURY; LUXURY housing; BIOTIC communities; PUBLIC spaces; COEXISTENCE of species
- Publication
Urban Ecosystems, 2024, Vol 27, Issue 1, p63
- ISSN
1083-8155
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11252-023-01428-7