Coyote denning behavior in urban environments: An argument for more forests in cities

Recent research revealed that city dwelling coyotes select den sites regardless of proximity to human development and showed that attacks were most frequent near dens and in the denning months. Denning in human-dominated landscapes likely favors human and coyote encounters during pup rearing, yet den site selection can vary across urban contexts with different green-space configurations. Here, we used resource selection functions to analyze den site selection in suburban areas of the Chicago Metropolitan Area and investigate whether similar selection patterns are exhibited by the species when urban forests are comparatively abundant. Our conditional regression functions compared used and available den sites and revealed a marked preference for forested sites and avoidance of developed ones. Our results did not support any effect of wetlands, open natural land cover or agriculture on den site selection. Selection patterns for forests were exhibited at the local (30 meters around den site) and patch scale (200 meters around den site), but patch scale models had better performance at predicting den site use indicating that selection likely happens at a wider scale. These results indicate that coyotes preferentially den in forested patches and avoid developed areas in cities where sufficient forest cover exists, suggesting that urban forests may reduce human-coyote conflict in cities. Whether these patterns causally translate into differences in conflict rates will require linking den distributions with human activity and conflict report data across a gradient of forest cover in anthropogenic landscapes.