• European badger
• mesocarnivores
• wildfires

Wildfires are among the most important factors of ecological change and evolutionary drive. Based on our knowledge, the presence of the European badger (Meles meles) in recently burnt areas has only been described from the third year onwards. This could be related to a change in the vegetation structure on the ground over time and thus also to the availability of resources in these areas. To explore and understand the influence of these events on the behaviour and use of space of the European badger, the influence of wildfires and of interspecific interactions were investigated, as well as the extent of which these may alter the spatial and temporal behavioural patterns of this species. The study was carried out in a typical Mediterranean ecosystem, the Monte Pisano Mountain chain area in Tuscany, Italy. The area included chestnut and pine forest burnt in September 2018. The study took place during the 2021 summer season in an area of about 18 km2 in total.
Monitoring was carried out using camera-traps distributed over 50 sites equally distributed between mixed-severity burnt and unburnt; overall each sampling unit was active for four consecutive weeks, assuring all the sites were sampled between June and July 2018. In a preliminary data analysis, the degree of spatial overlap of the three main mesocarnivore species was estimated using the Pianka index. This was followed by further analysis of the spatial distribution of the badger with zero-inflated Poisson models. For the study of the locomotor activity pattern of the badger and the comparison of this with the other species, an estimate of the kernel density overlap was used, the results of the temporal overlap data were finally evaluated with the compareAct test.
Occupancy rates depended significantly on the interaction between burnt status and forest type (p<0.01), as well as on the interaction between forest type and grounded wood (p<0.05). The locomotory activity of the badger, mainly nocturnal, showed no differences from the typical patterns of the species. Furthermore, it was highly overlapped with that of the Red fox (Vulpes vulpes) Δ overlap (0.789) and Stone marten (Martes foina) Δ overlap (0.791), but at the same time differed from these species in the distribution of the main activity phases. Indeed, the latter appears to have a bimodal pattern in the badger, in distinction a unimodal pattern in Red fox and Stone marten.
The analysis basically showed that the unburnt chestnut forest was the habitat most frequented by the badger. Specifically, this may depend on the greater presence of resources and suitable areas for refuge within chestnut groves. The locomotor activity results, on the other hand,confirmed the high capacity of the mesocarnivores to cohabit, even in a fire-modified environment. With this study, we obtained for the first time information on the space use by badgers in recently burnt areas. However, based on our results, this work opens up to further questions about the possible use during other successional phases, such as the periods immediately following the event, but also in the long term.