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Factors explaining the occurrence of the Siberian flying squirrel in urban forest landscape

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Abstract

Urban forests are often modified and fragmented by human land use and the original habitat might exist only in remnant patches. Due to their specific habitat requirements and unwillingness to move through matrix many forest-dwelling mammals are susceptible to changes in landscape structure. It is important to understand how the availability of suitable habitat and landscape fragmentation affect species distributions, and what landscape characteristics are essential to the persistence of a given species to conserve urban wildlife. We investigated the effect of landscape composition and configuration on the occurrence of the Siberian flying squirrel, a small-sized arboreal rodent, in a partly urbanized area of Eastern Finland. All suitable and potential forest patches were searched to determine the presence or absence of species, and the landscape characteristics of occupied sites were compared to those of unoccupied sites. Flying squirrels occurred both at the edges of large suitable forested areas, but also in small forest fragments within residential areas. Surprisingly, urban areas did not have a negative effect on the flying squirrel occurrence. Occurrence probability was not either associated with the proportion of suitable habitat, but occupied sites contained larger amount of movement habitat and had shorter distances to nearest occupied sites than unoccupied sites. Our results show that flying squirrels can exist in urbanized landscape and near residential areas, but more detailed information on habitat use and survival is still needed to determine the long-term persistence and viability of the urban populations.

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Acknowledgments

City of Kuopio is acknowledged for providing the forest stand data and facilities during field work. We also thank Pöyry and Suunnittelukeskus consultancies for access and permission to use their data based on flying squirrel fecal pellet surveys made in 2006–2008. We are grateful to Mari Wikholm for taking part to field work. Heidi Björklund, Otso Ovaskainen, Andrea Santangeli and two anonymous reviewers are thanked for the valuable comments which improved the earlier version of the manuscript. This study was funded by Maj and Tor Nessling Foundation (grant numbers 2012476, 2013150 and 2014367), and Research Foundation of the University of Helsinki for SM.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Finnish Museum of Natural History, University of Helsinki, P. O. Box 17, P. Rautatiekatu 13, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Sanna Mäkeläinen & Ilpo K. Hanski

  2. Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, Viikinkaari 1, P. O. Box 65, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Marko Schrader

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  1. Sanna Mäkeläinen
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Correspondence to Sanna Mäkeläinen.

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Mäkeläinen, S., Schrader, M. & Hanski, I.K. Factors explaining the occurrence of the Siberian flying squirrel in urban forest landscape. Urban Ecosyst 18, 223–238 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-014-0381-0

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