Habitat fragmentation sensitivity in mammals: a target selection for landscape planning comparing two different approaches (bibliographic review and expert based)

Habitat fragmentation is a process at landscape scale. This work contributes to reviewing the sensitivity to habitat fragmentation of a set of relatively common and widespread mammal species occurring in central Italy, by comparing evidences from literature to a recently published selection of species obtained by an expert-based method. This comparison allows us to select a set of mammal species that may be considered as targets in the landscape environmental planning and monitoring. For their ecological specialization, trophic level, large home range and other ecological traits, such as the dispersal ability, water-related shrews, forest rodents and mustelids, appear as the more sensitive groups to habitat fragmentation. Considering a sample of 30 species occurring in central Italy, we observed differences between the two approaches (by evidences from literature and an expert-based method), which may be due to incomplete literature or lack of meaningful predictors (bias in selection of ecological traits used in the expert-based procedure). Since in the ecological network planning the selection of fragmentation-sensitive target species is a priority, we suggest further field research, reviews and expert-based approaches on other vertebrates aimed to define sets of species useful to land agencies for monitoring environmental plans at landscape scale.