Many environmental patterns that may have profound effects on wildlife communities occur at the landscape scale, e.g. habitat fragmentation, human demography and distribution of various resources. In order to understand how alterations of such patterns could influence e.g. wildlife species occurrences and community composition it is important to first study these relationships empirically and on the appropriate scale. We surveyed the wildlife community in a Mid-Swedish boreal ecosystem using pellet group counts, while walking so called wildlife triangles. Our main aim was to investigate how the distribution of medium- and large-sized wild mammals and large-sized forest birds were affected by environmental variables at the landscape scale. In 2001-2003, pellet groups of mammals and forest birds were counted on 211 triangular routes with a perimeter of 4+4+4 km. The pellet groups were accumulated over winter and counted in spring. The environmental properties of each triangle, including information on latitude, altitude, infrastructure, land cover, forest type and forest stage, were determined using GIS maps. Statistical analyses involved mainly ordination (Principal Component Analysis). Significant environmental variables explaining the wildlife community composition and distribution in the boreal ecosystem were altitude, clear-felling and infrastructure. Our conclusion however is that most boreal mammal and forest bird species are habitat generalists and show little spatial pattern in distributions on landscape scale. This is important knowledge, indicating that habitat selectiveness and structuring animal interactions probably occur on a local scale in the boreal forest. Ultimately it provides important directions for e.g. conservation measures and wildlife management.
Key words: forest grouse, landscape, mammals, Principal Component Analysis, pellet count, species richness, wildlife triangle