3.1 Spatial overlap and habitat suitability
Across Connecticut, the landscape was more suitable for eastern cottontail than New England cottontail. We found New England cottontail habitat suitability ranged from 0.00 to 0.83 and eastern cottontail habitat suitability ranged from 0.00 to 0.97 (Figure 2). Models for both species performed well, with an average AUC value of 0.92 (SD = 0.01) for New England cottontail models and 0.84 (SD = 0.01) for eastern cottontail models. In total, we found 48.22 ha were highly suitable for New England cottontail (top 25% of suitability values) and 56,769.39 ha were highly suitable for eastern cottontail (top 25% of suitability values). The percentage of highly suitable New England cottontail habitat overlapping with highly suitable eastern cottontail habitat was 100% and the percentage of highly suitable eastern cottontail habitat overlapping with highly suitable New England cottontail habitat was 0.00%.
Both species’ habitat suitability was associated with the proximity to and spatial pattern of young forest, shrubland, and understory vegetation. The MSPA predictor had the largest contribution to both the New England (28.34%) and eastern cottontail (27.18%) habitat suitability models (Table 2). The MSPA categories most influential to New England cottontail habitat suitability were core, core openings, and perforations, while all MSPA categories had similar influence on eastern cottontail habitat suitability except background (Figure 3). The land cover most commonly comprising core openings was mixed forest, with 86.63% of the core openings land cover being mixed forest (Table S1). Habitat suitability decreased with increasing distance from shrublands and transitional to forest for both species. However, the contribution of shrublands and transitional to forest differed between the two species, where shrublands contributed more to the New England cottontail model (13.99%) than the eastern cottontail model (2.58%) and transitional to forest contributed more to the eastern cottontail model (25.76%) than the New England cottontail model (9.64%). Understory composition also contributed highly to the habitat suitability for both species, with proximity to a mixed invasive understory contributing more to the New England cottontail model (10.61%) than eastern cottontail (1.28%) while proximity to a native understory species, greenbrier, contributed more to the eastern cottontail model (9.10%) than New England cottontail (6.37%). Distance to buildings also contributed highly to both cottontail species’ habitat suitability, 14.38% for New England cottontail and 18.10% for eastern cottontail. New England cottontail habitat suitability was highest at least 250 m away from buildings, while eastern cottontail habitat suitability remained high across all distances to buildings (Figure 3, Table 2).