An assessment of a conservation strategy to increase garden connectivity for hedgehogs that requires cooperation between immediate neighbours: A barrier too far?

Urban areas are associated with high levels of habitat fragmentation. For some terrestrial species with limited climbing abilities, property boundaries can pose a significant problem by limiting access to residential gardens. The West European hedgehog ( Erinaceus europaeus ) has declined markedly in the UK but is commonly found in areas of human habitation, including residential gardens. ‘Hedgehog Street’ is a public engagement campaign aimed at recruiting volunteers (‘Hedgehog Champions’) to create access points (‘hedgehog highways’) across garden boundaries to improve habitat connectivity. In this study, we used a series of questionnaire surveys to explore motivations for and obstacles to the creation of highways. Householders were more likely to have created a highway if they were already aware of the Hedgehog Street campaign, if their garden contained a high number of wildlife-friendly features and if they considered watching wildlife to be important. Hedgehog Champions created, on average, 1.69 highways each with 52.0% creating none; this would equate to an estimated >120,000 across all registered Champions. In comparison, 6.1–29.8% of non-Champions stated that they had made a highway. However, most highways had been created in boundaries that could already be traversed via naturally occurring holes: only 11.4% of garden boundaries could be traversed, and 3.2% of gardens accessed, just via a hedgehog highway. In addition, only 5.0% of gardens were considered totally inaccessible to hedgehogs. The most common reasons cited for not having made a highway were that householders’ gardens were already accessible to hedgehogs followed by concerns relating to boundary ownership and / or communicating with neighbours. Future studies need to identify strategies for overcoming these obstacles to maximize citizen engagement, particularly with those householders who are not innately “wildlife-friendly”, and to quantify the degree to which networks of highways affect patterns of individual movement and, ultimately, populations.