Scavenger community structure along an environmental gradient from boreal forest to alpine tundra in Scandinavia

Scavengers can have strong impacts on food webs, and awareness of their role in ecosystems have increased during the last decades. In our study, we used baited camera traps to quantify the structure of the winter scavenger community in central Scandinavia across a forest-alpine continuum and assess how climatic conditions affected spatial patterns of species occurrences. Canonical correspondence analysis revealed that the main habitat type (forest or alpine tundra) and snow depth were main determinants of community structure. According to hierarchical modelling of the species community, species richness was higher in forest than in alpine habitat but was only weakly associated with temperature and snow depth. However, we observed stronger and more diverse impacts of these covariates on individual species. Occurrence at baits of habitat generalists (red fox, golden eagle and common raven) typically increased at low temperatures and high snow depth, probably due to increased energetic dem...