Urban Wildlife in Your Backyard: Community Experience and Impacts with Coyotes (Canis latrans), Outdoor Cats (Felis catus), and Songbirds

Greenspaces in urban areas can be inspiring or problematic to people as well as vital to the animals living in or moving through them. The behavior and landscape design of people neighboring greenspaces can also affect not only species presence but interactions among species. The Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN) has created a methodology for cities to record urban species and share their data with others across the globe. UWIN Portland currently has 33 camera traps within greenspaces spanning a 49 kilometer transect. Using these UWIN-Portland camera traps, we identified ten greenspace communities to conduct a survey gauging residents experiences, interactions, and attitudes towards coyotes (Canis latrans) and the outdoor domestic cat (Felis catus) aiming to answer the questions “can human-wildlife attitudes be predicted using lived experiences and backyard attributes?”. The social surveys consisted of twelve analytical questions and three demographic questions. Questions included what and when their experience with the species was, how they view wildlife, and actions / items within their yards (i.e. allowed their cats outdoors, have a garden, etc.). 100 surveys were distributed (1000 in total) at each site within one mile of the focal sites, and 245 were returned. Preliminary results show a negative relationship between attitude and actions in yards. E.g., those in agreement with utilitarian attitudes carried out actions in connection with stewardship and bio-centric attitudes. Results will be used to aid in urban greenspace management strategies by exhibiting how lived experiences can be used to predict attitudes, and thus actions surrounding greenspaces.