Abstract US Corn Belt landscapes are heavily anthropogenic, consisting of a vast agricultural matrix with embedded urban areas. Little non-agricultural vegetated land remains in this region. Vegetation and vegetated areas in urban settings may thus be key to supporting this region’s wildlife. We sought to assess relationships between mesopredator (mid-sized mammalian omnivores and carnivores) distributions and landscape structure and composition in a Corn Belt city, Iowa City, Iowa, USA. Using data from a network of motion-triggered cameras, we constructed multi-season occupancy models for five mesopredator species to identify occupancy patterns and their relationship to vegetated and built land cover and landscape structure within species-specific home range buffers. Species with larger home ranges, red fox and coyote, were more likely to colonize sites with greater amounts of forested land cover, more streams, and more cohesive patches of non-agricultural vegetation, and less likely to colonize sites with more impervious surfaces. Once established at sites, opossum and coyote were unlikely to disappear from sites regardless of landscape composition and structure. However, red fox was less likely to go extinct from sites with more impervious land cover while domestic cats were more likely to go extinct from sites with greater extents of and more cohesive natural land covers. These findings, by highlighting key landscape aspects driving occupancy dynamics for these species, could support mesopredator conservation in cities in agricultural landscapes.
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