Globally, cities and urban areas are expanding rapidly, leading to increased human–wildlife conflict. To reduce human–snake conflict in Australia, ‘snake catchers’ are employed to remove and relocate snakes detected by the public in urban or rural areas. Where records of human–snake interactions are being collected, these data can inform our understanding of human–snake conflict and, potentially, snake urban ecology. In this study, we analysed 5210 snake–human interactions collected over a 7‐year period (2011–2017) in Darwin, Australia, to investigate temporal patterns in species activity and identify environmental drivers of human–snake conflict. Encouragingly, about 90% of recorded human–snake interactions during this period in Darwin were with harmless snakes. While there was no clear effect of human activity biasing snake callout patterns at temporal scales greater than one day, reduced callouts between 00:00 and 06:00 may be driven by either reduced human or snake activity. We found population trends of all taxa investigated, except for elapids, to be stable. Elapids appeared to have suffered a small, yet statistically significant, decline. We also found that all taxa showed strong cyclical patterns within years, with considerable variation between species in the timing of annual peaks in activity. This study proves that consistently collected and carefully analysed datasets of urban wildlife reported by citizens can be used to inform our understanding of urban wildlife ecology, as well as potentially providing insights that improve wildlife management in urban environments.

中文翻译：

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城市平原上的蛇：澳大利亚达尔文市蛇活动和人蛇冲突的时间模式

在全球范围内，城市和城市地区正在迅速扩张，导致人类与野生动物之间的冲突加剧。为了减少澳大利亚人与蛇之间的冲突，“蛇捕手”被用于在城市或农村地区清除并重新安置公众发现的蛇。在收集人蛇互动记录的地方，这些数据可以帮助我们理解人蛇冲突，甚至还可能了解蛇的城市生态。在这项研究中，我们分析了在澳大利亚达尔文市（7–2011）的7年期间（2011-2017）收集的5210条蛇与人的相互作用，以调查物种活动的时间模式并确定人与蛇冲突的环境驱动因素。令人鼓舞的是，在此期间，达尔文所记录的约90％的人与蛇互动都是与无害的蛇有关的。尽管没有明显的人类活动会在大于一天的时间尺度上使蛇的呼出方式产生偏见，但人类活动或蛇的活动减少可能会导致00:00和06:00之间的呼出减少。我们发现，除椭圆形外，所有调查的类群的种群趋势都是稳定的。Elapids似乎遭受了小幅下降，但在统计上显着下降。我们还发现，所有类群在数年内均表现出强周期性模式，物种间的年度活动高峰时间差异很大。这项研究证明，公民报告的一致收集和仔细分析的城市野生动植物数据集可用于增进我们对城市野生动植物生态学的理解，并有可能提供改善城市环境中野生动植物管理的见解。