Drone-based LiDAR reveals behaviour-specific 3D habitat attributes of wild boar (Sus scrofa) in urban-edge forests

Heavily visited urban-edge forests create frequent encounters between people and wild boar (Sus scrofa), increasing risks to public safety and property. Effective human-wild boar coexistence requires practical management, which in turn depends on understanding how animals use space under human disturbance. Yet despite the prevalence of human-wildlife conflicts in these settings, fine-scale studies of wild boar ecology in urban-edge forests remain scarce. Moreover, habitat assessments have largely relied on coarse, two-dimensional variables, providing limited insight into behaviour-specific microhabitat use.

We investigated whether fine-scale three-dimensional (3D) habitat structure explains wild boar behaviour in a human-dominated forest landscape. Using drone monitoring (Feb–Apr 2025) and drone-based LiDAR mapping (Mar–Apr 2025), we linked boar locations classified as travelling or resting to LiDAR-derived terrain and vegetation structure metrics. We compared environmental conditions between the two behaviours using odds-ratio analysis, then used a resource selection function (RSF) to examine whether travelling locations are predictable from 3D habitat structure.

Travelling and resting occurred in measurably different 3D environments. Travelling was more likely on north-facing terrain and in areas with higher shrub density and canopy cover. When directly compared with travelling, resting sites showed even denser shrub cover and were associated with rougher microtopography, consistent with the use of refuge-like spaces. The RSF results further confirmed that travelling locations are non-random and can be partially explained by 3D habitat features.

Our findings highlight that behaviour-based analyses at fine spatial resolution, enabled by drone-LiDAR, can improve the accuracy and ecological relevance of habitat associations in urban-edge forests. This evidence can support more targeted identification of likely wild boar use areas for conflict mitigation. Future studies should incorporate seasonal and time-of-day variation and explicitly quantify anthropogenic factors (e.g., noise and built structures) to refine behaviour-specific predictions.