Assessing the role of habitat, climate, and anthropization gradients on terrestrial mammal diversity in the western Mediterranean basin

Abstract

Mammal species globally exhibit distribution patterns conditioned by environmental conditions and human impact. The Mediterranean basin provides an ideal system to study these effects due to its diverse climate, and habitat conditions. In this work, we aim to assess the impact of landscape heterogeneity and anthropization degree on terrestrial mammal diversity in this region. Accordingly, we deployed over 300 camera traps across 28 sites for 3 months. Detected mammal species (weighing more than 1kg) were classified as domestic carnivores, domestic ungulates, wild carnivores, wild ungulates, lagomorphs, and large rodents. Alpha and beta diversity were calculated for each group and all wild mammals. Simple linear regressions and multimodal analysis were conducted between mammal diversities and climate, environmental conditions, landscape heterogeneity, and anthropization degree variables. Redundancy analyses were performed to identify variables and species determining the mammalian community composition. Indexes measuring landscape heterogeneity, anthropization degree, and its 30‐year change did not correlate with mammal diversity. However, the difference in elevation within sites and domestic carnivore abundance showed a significant positive correlation with some of the diversity indexes. Nonetheless, rainfall and mean elevation factors generally showed the highest correlation with mammal diversity. Instead, a few influential species, including generalists and open‐habitat specialists, highlighted the importance of conserving open areas, as well as the importance of the Pyrenees region as a key habitat for certain species. Therefore, climatic variables emerged as the key determinants of mammal diversity, highlighting climate change as a potential threat to mammal diversity in this area.