Asymmetrical intraguild interactions with coyotes, red foxes, and domestic dogs may contribute to competitive exclusion of declining gray foxes.

ABSTRACT: Species coexistence is governed by availability of resources and intraguild interactions including strategies to reduce ecological overlap. Gray foxes are dietary generalist mesopredators expected to benefit from anthropogenic disturbance, but populations have declined across the midwestern USA, including severe local extirpation rates coinciding with high coyote and domestic dog occurrence and low red fox occurrence. We used data from a large-scale camera trap survey in southern Illinois, USA to quantify intraguild spatial and temporal interactions among the canid guild including domestic dogs. We used a two-species co-occurrence model to make pairwise assessments of conditional occupancy and detection rates. We also estimated temporal activity overlap among species and fit a fixed-effect

SUBMITTER: Morin DJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9251843 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature