Altitude shapes the environmental drivers of large‐scale variation in abundance of a widespread mammal species

Abstract Aim Habitat quality and heterogeneity directly influence the distribution and abundance of organisms at different spatial scales. Determining the main environmental factors driving the variation in species abundance is crucial to understand the underlying ecological processes, and this is especially important for widely distributed species living in contrasting environments. However, the responses to environmental variation are usually described at relatively small spatial scales. Here, we studied the variation in abundance of a widely distributed mustelid, the European badger (Meles meles), across France. Location The whole metropolitan France. Methods We used (a) direct detections of 9,439 dead and living badgers, from 2006 to 2009, to estimate badger relative abundance in 703 small agricultural regions of metropolitan France and (b) a Bayesian modeling approach to identify the main environmental determinants influencing badger abundance. Results Despite a continuous distribution of badger in France, we found large variation in badger abundance between regions, explained by environmental factors. Among a set of 13 environmental variables, we demonstrated that badger abundance in lowlands (