Factors affecting spatiotemporal behaviour in the European brown hare Lepus europaeus: a meta-analysis

1. The European brown hare Lepus europaeus is the most widely distributedhare species of the world, being naturally present throughout Eurasia andintroduced as a game species in most continents. Despite the importance ofthis lagomorph for both management and conservation, a quantitative summaryof its spatiotemporal behaviour is still lacking.2. Taking advantage of 51 selected studies conducted throughout the nativerange of the hare and spanning the last 40 years, we used meta-analyticapproaches in order to: 1) investigate home range size in relation to ecologicalfactors; 2) test preference across major habitat types; and 3) provide aquantitative synthesis of hare activity patterns.3. Temporally adjusted home range size of hare populations decreased withincreasing cropland cover (cereal and non-cerealcrops), suggesting that homerange size gets smaller with increasing food availability, and predicting thathare populations living in absence of crops would double their mean homerange size compared to those inhabiting areas covered entirely by cropland.Hare populations where more males were sampled showed larger home ranges,in line with the polygynous mating system of this species.4. Hares preferred cropland and grassland over other habitats for foraging, thusselecting the two habitats characterised by the majority of trophic resourcesfor this species. Yet, habitat types were used proportionally to their availabilityoverall, except for the general avoidance of human settlements. Hares weremainly nocturnal, with the lowest activity during daytime, when activity wasabout one third of that at night, and showed moonlight avoidance, probablyto limit encounters with nocturnal predators.5. Our work emphasises the importance of open habitats and especially croplandfor this lagomorph, but also suggests some plasticity in the use of space andtime by hares. Such plasticity may help this mammal to cope with futureenvironmental changes, providing that landscape heterogeneity ismaintained.