Landscape perception, spatial scales, and the wild boar-human being ecological interaction

Perception generates eco-fields by associating organismic functions with specific environmental features, thus translating a neutral matrix of features into a cognitive landscape regulating the interactions between organisms and environment. The change of cognitive landscape across spatial scales, due to the scale-dependence of both eco-fields and neutral landscape patterns, implies that different features may concurrently control organism-environment interactions at different scales. The present research embraces this perspective in evaluating how landscape features at increasing spatial scales shape the occurrence of negative interactions between wild-boars and human beings. The problem was tackled through species distribution modelling, evaluating the importance of landscape features across spatial scales. To this end, data on wild-boar damages in the Campania region (Southern Italy) during 2020-2021 were modeled using metrics of diversity/complexity, shape, area/edge and fragmentation. Metrics were calculated within circular buffers of 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 and 3200 m from a 10 m resolution categorical raster obtained from the 3rd level of the Nature Map. Several tree-based algorithms, scoring the highest consistency in performances across scales over multiple independent runs with randomly selected pseudo-absences, were adopted to evaluate the importance of predictors. Clear importance profile, consistent among algorithms, were observed, with mostly unimodal variations across spatial scales. Moving from local to larger scales, patch richness becomes critical in predicting wild-boar damages, especially at middle scales, whereas fragmentation (mesh size) is relevant mostly at local scale and landscape complexity (relative mutual information, joint entropy) increases its relevance at larger scales. Overall, findings provide novel insights into how wild boars perceive landscape patterns and how such cognitive landscape can affect their interaction with human beings.