Spatial Usage and Patterns of Corvus frugilegus in Urban Habitats of Suwon, South Korea

The frequency of wildlife appearing in urban areas is increasing. This poses a threat to the hygiene of the metropolitan regions and for the lives of residents. In Suwon, South Korea, the appearance of Corvus frugilegus in the city began around 2017, and it is necessary to identify C.frugilegus's preferred habitat to achieve efficient results in terms of planning an alternative habitat and in the aspect of city management. However, in the case of avian species, the geographical range of movements is vast; thus, data collection is limited. Therefore, this study used citizen science to collect C.frugilegus's locations in urban areas of Suwon City from November 2020 to March 2021. There were 4523 location points of C.frugilegus's occurrence data collected in Suwon City, and each data was collected every 20 minutes. The citizen data was analyzed by Spatial Autocorrelation separately from agricultural and urban areas to investigate C.frugilegus's preferred habitat. Furthermore, MaxENT was driven to predict the distribution and preferred habitat of C.frugilegus within the identified time zone in which the pattern of C.frugilegus's moving from urban areas to feeding grounds was evident. For environmental variables, large biotope category, building floors (high/middle/low), streetlights, telephone poles, vegetation percentage, and Euclidian distance from agricultural land was included. As a result, during the daytime, high contribution values of Euclidian distance from farmland were found below 500m, and relatively higher contribution values were shown during the noon when DEM was below 50m. This can be interpreted that the high rate of C.frugilegus's appearance in urban areas are located in the heart of Suwon, not the boundary of Suwon where urban areas include mountains.