Editing maps of landscape elements according to their potential influence on animals by combining multi-source data: a case study about red foxes in urban environment

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Wildlife present in urban environments uses the space as shaped by human infrastructures and activities (Jokimäki et al., 2011). Landscape planning has to take into account animals’ space use so that to enable good ecological functioning and to identify places of interface between wildlife and human, particularly relevant in the management of zoonosis (Plumer et al., 2014). Meeting this need remains a challenge due to the scarcity of animals’ data and their dependency on specific collect contexts (the observed animal, its personality, the area, recording parameters).Our study case deals with red fox (Vulpes vulpes) in the city of Nancy in eastern France. Our aim is to propose a map of landscape elements that would be selected according to their potential influence on the species’ space use (Burel et al., 1999). This influence may be attractiveness for the presence of animals, or avoidance. It may also correspond to corridors or obstacles to movements.The edition of such map implied integrating multi-theme and multi-source geographical data, about physical landscape description, human activities, animals’ locations, and from institutional databases, crowd-sourcing, local expert studies and ad-hoc data collections (Zhang et al., 2019). The targeted integration result was a set of geometrical parcels characterized into two distinct classifications on land cover types and human land uses. Labels in the classifications were defined relying on the analysis of red foxes’ GPS locations (Robardet, 2007) which highlighted specific landscape elements to consider (vegetation patches, railways, property boundaries which might be fences, walls) and temporalities related to daytime and night time and to individual rhythms.Validation is based on a comparison between the resulted map and reference data based on field survey and visual interpretation of images. The map stands as a display of the space interpreted with a landscape planning objective and requiring regular updating.