Boglárka Mészáros, József Bürgés, Mónika Tamás, Blanka Gál, Dénes Schmera, Andrew J. Hamer
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Context
Human-induced landscape modification, such as urbanization, creates new environments that can have adverse effects on flora and fauna, posing threats to biodiversity. Understanding how reptiles respond to urbanization is crucial, especially in light of their ongoing population declines.
Objectives
We examined the influence of landscape-scale and local-scale urbanization features on the abundance of an aquatic snake species. Our investigation focused on dice snakes (Natrix tessellata) inhabiting a lake with a heavily urbanized shoreline.
Methods
We conducted visual encounter surveys at 25 study sites during the activity period of dice snakes around Lake Balaton in Hungary. We measured both landscape-scale and local-scale variables, including urban land use cover, vegetation cover, road cover, distance of main roads and city size, emergent vegetation cover and the area of artificial rock and concrete shoreline protection structures. We analysed snake survey data using N-mixture models to estimate abundance and examine relationships with landscape-scale and local-scale variables.
Results
Urban land use cover, road cover, the proximity of main roads and the extent of artificial rock and concrete shoreline protection structures positively affected the abundance of snakes. These findings imply that urban habitats may offer new ecological opportunities for dice snakes.
Conclusions
The findings of this study indicate that both landscape-scale and local-scale human-induced landscape modifications may have a positive impact on the abundance of urban snakes. Taken together, our findings suggest that urbanization is a complex phenomenon, affecting species at different levels and with subtle effects.
期刊介绍:
Landscape Ecology is the flagship journal of a well-established and rapidly developing interdisciplinary science that focuses explicitly on the ecological understanding of spatial heterogeneity. Landscape Ecology draws together expertise from both biophysical and socioeconomic sciences to explore basic and applied research questions concerning the ecology, conservation, management, design/planning, and sustainability of landscapes as coupled human-environment systems. Landscape ecology studies are characterized by spatially explicit methods in which spatial attributes and arrangements of landscape elements are directly analyzed and related to ecological processes.