evidence: Our research confirms the importance of rural villages in sustaining hedgehog numbers in the UK countryside. Our findings suggest a two-pronged approach for hedgehog conservation: firstly, maintaining hedgehog subpopulations in rural villages, for example by improving garden management and preserving green spaces and secondly, improving the surrounding arable land, chiefly in respect to cover from predation and connectivity between rural villages. Although this research shows that residential areas are selected by hedgehogs, hedgehogs are also in decline in urban areas (PTES and BHPS 2015) and villages and face a suite of problems which were beyond the scope of this study including the following: poisoning from molluscicides and rodenticides (Keymer et al. 1991; Dowding et al. 2010b), a lack of habitat connectivity due to enclosed gardens (Hof and Bright 2009) and deaths on roads (Huijser and Bergers 2000; Rondinini and Doncaster 2002). Wildlife friendly gardening and the consideration of habitat connectivity in urban planning may reduce some of these threats to hedgehogs (Hof and Bright 2009).