Does wild boar rooting affect spatial distribution of active burrows of meadow-dwelling voles?
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Does wild boar rooting affect spatial distribution of active burrows of meadow-dwelling voles? Emiliano Mori 1,2
&
Lorenzo Lazzeri 1
Received: 28 June 2020 / Accepted: 5 October 2020 # Institute of Zoology, Slovak Academy of Sciences 2020
Abstract Soil overturn by wild boar Sus scrofa is known to affect biodiversity, from plant communities to invertebrates, reptiles and small mammals. Rooting activity has been shown to be particularly intensive in open areas and particularly on fallows and meadows located on hill or mountain tops. In these habitat types, the impact of wild boar on small mammal assemblies has never been assessed. In this work, we evaluated whether rooting activity affected the spatial distribution of the Savi’s pine vole Microtus savii in a hilly area of Central Italy, throughout four seasons. The spatial distribution of this vole has been determined through the open-hole index, i.e. by assessing the vole propensity to reopen tunnel entrances which we previously closed with soil. Rooting intensity was the highest in cold months, i.e. when drive hunting may increase wild boar occurrence within protected areas and outside wooded areas. According to our GLMM, reopening of vole burrow entrances increased with increasing distances from rooted areas and with increasing geophytic diversity. Meadow-dwelling voles living on shallow underground burrow systems seem to avoid soil overturn by wild boar and that they prefer creating their tunnels where plant diversity building up the staple of their diet is the highest. Our results furtherly emphasized the importance of wild boar monitoring also in open areas and hill grasslands, particularly when rooting intensity is the highest, i.e. in cold months. Keywords Environmental alteration . Management . Microtus savii . Open areas . Sus scrofa
Introduction Animal species which significantly alter or modify a habitat, influencing local species richness and landscape heterogeneity, e.g. elephants, wild boar, ibex, porcupines, beavers and termites are defined as “ecosystem engineers” (e.g. Dangerfield et al. 1998; Wright et al. 2002; Fritz 2017). Digs and shallow burrows by these species may (i) increase soil oxygenation and (ii) build up new microhabitats able to capture runoff rain water and to increase plant germination and renewal (Gutterman and Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.2478/s11756-020-00622-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Emiliano Mori [email protected] 1
Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita, Università di Siena, Via P.A. Mattioli, Siena 4 - 53100, Italy
2
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche – Istituto di Ricerca sugli Ecosistemi Terrestri, Via Madonna del Piano 10, Sesto Fiorentino, Firenze 50019, Italy
Herr 1981; Gutterman 1997). Wild boar rooting is also a natural soil-altering factor (Sondej and Kwiatkowska-Falińska 2017), although it may dramatically affect understorey composition and ecosystem functional traits, as overtu
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