Ecosystem engineers enter the city: Habitat characteristics influencing the distribution of Eurasian beavers Castor fiber in a human-transformed landscape

•Beavers generally avoid urbanized areas at the landscape scale.•Regions densely populated by humans host non-negligible proportion of beaver sites.•Vegetation persisting between watercourses and roads constitutes a niche for beaver. In recent decades, the population of the Eurasian beaver Castor fiber has increased significantly, and from near extinction the species has become widespread again over large part of its former range. However, the recovery of the beaver population is giving rise to increasing numbers of human-beaver conflicts in areas inhabited by humans. The key challenge of beaver population management is, therefore, to identify habitat characteristics that determine the presence of the species in the human-dominated landscape, including urban areas. Based on a large-scale inventory of beavers conducted in one of the most densely populated regions of Europe, we show that the factors enhancing habitat suitability for beavers at the landscape scale are the increasing cover of meadows and surface waters, and the total length of watercourses. Although beavers avoid built-up areas, 13% of all recorded sites were located in the most densely populated regions, and the local habitat features that favour the presence of beavers in an urban landscape are the increasing cover of forests, meadows and surface waters, the total length of watercourses and the total length of roads. This indicates that patches of natural or semi-natural vegetation persisting along watercourses located in the vicinity of communication routes constitute a habitat for beavers entering the most urbanized areas. The beaver is currently expanding into western and southern Europe, but the species’ future distribution will include highly transformed urban areas. To limit human-beaver conflicts, predictions of beaver distributions in human-dominated landscapes should be used in urban and landscape planning.