Domestic Cat Abundance and Activity Across a Residential Land Use Gradient

Abstract

Free-ranging domestic cats are a detriment to wildlife and humans by preying on native species and transmitting disease. As a result, removing free-ranging cats from the landscape has become a conservation and public health priority. Estimating cat population size with an unbiased sampling design, however, especially in human-dominated areas, is logistically challenging and rarely done. The lack of robust cat population sampling limits our understanding of where cats pose risks, which is important for evaluating management strategies, such as trap-remove or trap-neuter-return. We hypothesized that cat abundance and activity both depend on human land use and demographics. Using a network of sites participating in a community science program, we conducted transect and camera trap surveys to test predictions of cat population abundance and activity across a gradient of residential land use intensity. Both sampling methods determined that cat abundance was greatest in areas with intermediate human population density and lower educational attainment. Transect data also provided evidence that cat abundance was greatest at intermediate levels of impervious surface cover (e.g., road and buildings), while data from camera traps also showed that cat abundance was positively associated with household income. Using counts of cats observed on cameras, we found that the timing of cat activity varied depending on the degree of urban intensity. Cats were more strictly nocturnal in medium and high intensity residential land-use areas, possibly because a greater proportion of these cats are unowned or because they avoid human activity. These results suggest that transect surveys conducted during the day may undercount cats in urban environments where unowned free-ranging cats predominate. Taken together, our results highlight the importance of incorporating human demographics, land use patterns, and urban context in estimating the abundance of free-ranging cats to better inform management decisions and improve conservation outcomes.

Squirrel and tree‐shrew responses along an urbanisation gradient in a tropical mega‐city – reduced biodiversity, increased hybridisation of Callosciurus squirrels, and effects of habitat quality

“…We generated an index of predation pressure by recording the number of free‐ranging cats and free‐ranging dogs observed during each point count survey and calculated mean dog and cat values for each point. Cats are partially active at night, but diurnal direct observation surveys and camera traps (which operate 24 hours per day) uncover similar spatial patterns in cat densities in urban areas and uncover similar relationships between cat densities and environmental variables (Bennett et al ., 2021). We are thus confident that our data provided a useful index of cat abundance.…”

Counting the Capital's cats: Estimating drivers of abundance of free‐roaming cats with a novel hierarchical model

“…Our results for a district-wide density and population estimate are the first robust assessment of the Capital's free-roaming cats, but this estimate is likely biased low due to some assumed homogeneity of cat densities and the limited movement that has been reported for indoor/ outdoor housecats (Cove, Gardner, Simons, Kays, & O'Connell, 2018;Kays et al, 2020). We suggest that our estimate of 7296 free-roaming cats mostly represents the number of unowned cats in the district, rather than owned cats having access to the outdoors because: (1) we sampled yards extensively, but most cats were detected in alley/street/sidewalk settings; and (2) a rough analysis from a survey conducted during the time of our study showed that cat owners tend to let their cats out during the daytime, yet, the peaks of cat detections occurred at dawn and dusk in our study, corresponding with stray and feral cats from other studies (Bennett et al, 2021;Cove, Gardner, Simons, Kays, & O'Connell, 2018).…”

“…Outdoor cat observations have been correlated with a variety of anthropogenic and environmental factors. Most notably, the proportion of urban landcover and the proximity to natural areas (parks, riparian areas, wooded lots) and native predators (e.g., coyotes Canis latrans ) are drivers of landscape‐level cat detections (Bennett et al, 2021; Cove et al, 2019; Kays et al, 2015). Furthermore, neighborhood economic status is negatively correlated with cat observations (Childs, 1990; Flockhart et al, 2016).…”

Spatial and temporal overlap of domestic cats (Felis catus) and native urban wildlife

“…Because we hypothesize that the distribution of cats and native mammals would occupy different ends of an urban-natural continuum, we predicted that the degree of spatial overlap would be highest at the fringes of either species' habitat requirements and thus allow for spatially explicit management policies. We further predicted that the known variation in cat diel activity would result in substantial activity overlap between cats and all native mammal species 10.3389/fevo.2022.1048585 (Vanek et al, 2020;Bennett et al, 2021). Our findings identify areas with the greatest potential for bidirectional risk and can inform management policies that considers the wellbeing of cats and wildlife alike.…”