Residential gardens in urban areas offer substantial opportunities for biodiversity conservation. To realize this opportunity, a comprehensive understanding of which species prosper in gardens, which mechanisms promote their use of these green spaces and how these mechanisms can be manipulated by residents to achieve conservation outcomes, is needed. While substantial progress has been made in evaluating the mechanisms that influence the diversity, presence, and abundance of wildlife in gardens, how these mechanisms vary seasonally is largely unknown. This study investigated whether the garden features influencing the presence and/or abundance of arboreal, flying, and ground‐dwelling mammals in gardens varied seasonally using acoustic, trapping, and spotlighting surveys undertaken in four consecutive seasons (2018/19) in 52 gardens in southwestern Australia. As animal behavior and resource availability varies seasonally, we predicted that garden features influencing the presence and abundance of mammals in gardens would also vary seasonally. For arboreal and ground‐dwelling mammals, we found that some garden features (e.g., canopy cover and presence of dogs, respectively) were important in more than one season; however, none were important in all seasons with most only being influential in one. No garden features predicted the presence of flying mammals in more than one season. Our results suggest that sampling in a single or few seasons may fail to identify features influencing wildlife at times other than in the season of sampling, or alternatively, may overemphasize factors that do not operate across all seasons. Studies that consider the mechanisms on a seasonal basis will provide a more comprehensive list of features influencing the presence and abundance of animals in gardens. We suggest it is both those features that support wildlife in multiple or all seasons, and those that support critical life‐history events in a single season that could contribute to conservation if manipulated by residents appropriately.

中文翻译：

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管理野生动植物的花园：预测哺乳动物在花园中的存在和数量的功能随季节而变化

城市地区的住宅花园为生物多样性的保护提供了巨大的机会。为了抓住这个机会，需要全面了解花园中哪些物种繁盛，哪些机制促进了对这些绿色空间的利用以及居民如何利用这些机制来实现保护成果。尽管在评估影响花园中野生动植物的多样性，存在和丰富程度的机制方面已取得实质性进展，但这些机制如何随季节变化在很大程度上尚不清楚。这项研究调查了花园的特征是否会通过声学，诱捕，和连续四个季节（2018/19）在澳大利亚西南部52个花园中进行的聚光灯调查。由于动物行为和资源的可用性随季节而变化，我们预测影响花园中哺乳动物的存在和丰富度的花园特征也会随季节而变化。对于树栖和栖于地面的哺乳动物，我们发现在超过一个季节中，某些花园特征（例如，分别是树冠覆盖和有狗的地方）很重要。但是，在所有季节中都不重要，大多数仅在一个季节中具有影响力。没有花园的特征可以预测在一个以上的季节中会存在飞行的哺乳动物。我们的结果表明，在一个或几个季节中进行采样可能无法在采样季节以外的其他时间确定影响野生动植物的特征，或者 可能会过分强调并非在所有季节都起作用的因素。季节性考虑这些机制的研究将提供影响花园中动物的存在和丰富度的特征的更全面列表。我们建议，既可以在多个季节或整个季节支持野生动植物的特征，又可以在单个季节支持关键生命历史事件的特征，如果由居民适当操纵，则可能有助于保护环境。