This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Human-induced global change has reached an unprecedented scale and intensity. Through intensive land use and the associated loss of species, humans are permanently altering the habitats and communities of wild animals.
"How do predators manage to find their way in landscapes heavily shaped by humans and establish their niche? It is precisely this question that interested us," says Kathi Kasper, a doctoral student at the MRI PAS, the EBD-CSIC and the Leibniz-IZW and an author of the study. Humans also behave in a predator-like manner: Through hunting and transportation infrastructure, they pose a considerable risk to wildlife, but they also create new food resources for wildlife in the form of waste and, in some cases, livestock farming.
Similar dynamics also exist among wild animals themselves: Wolves can pose a threat to smaller carnivores such as foxes and badgers, while at the same time carcasses left behind by wolves provide food sources for other predators and scavengers. The research is published in the journal Diversity and Distributions. Scientists from the MRI PAS and the Leibniz-IZW studied wildlife populations in the Tuchola Forest in northern Poland, a forested area covering around 3,400 square kilometers (1,300 square miles), where wolves once again densely populate the landscape after more than a century of absence.
Using systematically positioned camera traps, the team recorded the habitat use of wolves (Canis lupus), red foxes (Vulpes vulpes), badgers (Meles meles) and martens (Martes spp.). The cameras also recorded human activity, the presence of prey and free-roaming domestic cats. The camera trap data were analyzed at two spatial levels.
At the broader landscape level, the scientists investigated which factors determine the occurrence of the various species. At the smaller scale, the focus was on how the animals coordinate their activities and use of space within these landscapes. This comparison provides a crucial insight into how coexistence—that is, living together—between competitors for food and predators can work.
"If we want to understand how wild animals get along with humans and with one another, we need to look closely at the spatial level at which we measure their occurrence. At the level of the entire landscape, wolves can certainly co-occur with humans. However, that does not mean that they actually encounter one another in the same place at the same time," explains Dries P.
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