Mammalian Camera Trap Data; Northwest Arkansas

The human footprint is rapidly expanding, and wildlife habitat is continuously being converted to human residential properties. Surviving wildlife that reside in developing areas are displaced to nearby undeveloped areas. However, some animals can co-exist with humans and acquire the necessary resources (food, water, shelter) within the human environment. This may be particularly true when development is low intensity, as in residential suburban yards. Yards are individually managed “greenspaces” that can provide a range of food (e.g., bird feeders, compost, gardens), water (bird baths and garden ponds), and shelter resources (e.g., brush-piles, outbuildings) and are surrounded by varying landscape cover. To evaluate which residential landscape and yard features influence the richness and diversity of mammalian herbivores and mesopredators; we deployed wildlife game cameras in 46 residential yards in summer 2021 and 96 yards in summer 2022. We found that mesopredator diversity had a neg..., 2.1 Study Sites
Our study took place from 4 April to 4 August 2021 and 2022 within an 80.5 km radius of downtown Fayetteville, Arkansas USA. Northwest Arkansas is a rapidly developing area with a current population of approximately 349,000 people. Fayetteville is located in the Ozark Highlands ecoregion and the landscape is primarily forested by mixed hardwood trees with open areas used for cattle pastures and some scattered agriculture. Our study took place in residential yards ranging from downtown Fayetteville to yards situated in more rural areas. We solicited volunteers from the Arkansas Master Naturalist Program and the University of Arkansas Department of Biological Sciences who allowed us to place cameras in their yards. We attempted to choose yards that represented the continuum of urban to rural settings and provided a range of yard features to which wildlife was likely to respond to.
2.2 Camera Setup
To document the presence of wildlife in residential yards, we deployed motio...,