Abstract
Urbanization is a known widespread phenomenon with profound forms of land use changes. Urban areas are characterized by habitat fragmentation and the replacement of natural habitat by human-made structures impacting various environmental conditions (e.g., natural resources, light and noise level, temperature) and transforming wildlife communities. The overall effect of urbanization on wildlife communities can differ between taxa, although most results suggest an overall decrease of species abundance and evenness in urbanized areas. In this study, we analyzed 25,982 photos from a camera trap survey in 33 gardens in the city of Münster, Germany. Our goal was to investigate if community composition, species diversity and evenness, and species co-occurrence patterns of terrestrial small mammals change as a function of impervious surface cover. Eight taxa were recorded and Apodemus spp. predominated (73.8%) the captured photos. We found that community composition, species diversity and evenness do not change along the urbanization gradient (i.e., impervious surface cover). In addition, we observed mainly neutral associations between species, although one trend for a positive association between Myodes glareolus and Crocidura spp., and two trends for negative associations between Apodemus spp. and Crocidura spp., and Rattus norvegicus and Sciurus vulgaris were discernable. Overall, our results suggest that this small mammal community is not impacted by urbanization. The small mammal species community of Münster is likely the result of generalist species expressing high phenotypic plasticity to bypass the urban filters explaining our overall neutral results. Further studies will be needed to address whether our findings for this small mammal species community are generalizable to multiple cities in Europe.