New Perspectives on European Wildcat (Felis silvestris, Schreber 1777) Habitat Suitability in Britain: Integrating Fossil Records to Improve Baselines for Reintroduction

In Britain, the European wildcat ( Felis silvestris , Schreber 1777) is located exclusively in Scotland. Considered to be Critically Endangered, the Scottish population is on the brink of extinction due to continued population decline through anthropogenic activities, contact with domestic and feral cats and habitat loss. Urgent and effective conservation strategies, including breeding and translocation programs, are required to support existing populations and aid the species' recovery. Understanding the species' environmental requirements and identifying suitable areas for wildcat reintroductions is therefore essential. However, using the species' modern range characteristics for habitat suitability projections is problematic due to extensive range contraction, resulting in the wildcat now occupying a reduced set of environmental conditions. Incorporating the wildcat's historic and recent fossil distribution data into such projections can significantly improve understanding of the species–environment relationship, prior to extensive range contraction. Here, we use the wildcat's historic and Holocene fossil record in Britain to construct multi‐temporal habitat suitability models (HSMs) under current climate conditions. The models identified elevation and human impact as important variables for predicting wildcat environmental suitability. Our results show that modern wildcat populations have suffered species‐environment truncation and now occupy only a portion of their potential environmental range across Britain, with a reduced realised niche breadth. The addition of Holocene fossil data into the models increases the amount of excellent and good habitat predicted by 37% and 197%, respectively, extending into other parts of Scotland, as well as England and Wales, and decreases predicted poor suitability conditions by 97.7%, thereby offering new avenues for reintroduction programs. Overall, our study underlines the benefits of using multi‐temporal HSMs to represent species–environment relationships more accurately and to improve habitat suitability projections under current and future climate change scenarios.