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Large carnivores are currently disappearing from many world regions because of habitat loss, prey depletion, and persecution. Ensuring large carnivore persistence requires safeguarding and sometimes facilitating the expansion of their populations. Understanding which conservation strategies, such as reducing persecution or restoring prey, are most effective to help carnivores to reclaim their former ranges is therefore important. Here, we systematically explored such alternative strategies for the endangered Persian leopard (Panthera pardus saxicolor) in the Caucasus. We combined a rule‐based habitat suitability map and a spatially explicit leopard population model to identify potential leopard subpopulations (i.e., breeding patches), and to test the effect of different levels of persecution reduction and prey restoration on leopard population viability across the entire Caucasus ecoregion and northern Iran (about 737,000 km2). We identified substantial areas of potentially suitable leopard habitat (~120,000 km2), most of which is currently unoccupied. Our model revealed that leopards could potentially recolonize these patches and increase to a population of >1,000 individuals in 100 yr, but only in scenarios of medium to high persecution reduction and prey restoration. Overall, reducing persecution had a more pronounced effect on leopard metapopulation viability than prey restoration: Without conservation strategies to reduce persecution, leopards went extinct from the Caucasus in all scenarios tested. Our study highlights the importance of persecution reduction in small populations, which should hence be prioritized when resources for conservation are limited. We show how individual‐based, spatially explicit metapopulation models can help in quantifying the recolonization potential of large carnivores in unoccupied habitat, designing adequate conservation strategies to foster such recolonizations, and anticipating the long‐term prospects of carnivore populations under alternative scenarios. Our study also outlines how data scarcity, which is typical for threatened range‐expanding species, can be overcome with a rule‐based habitat map. For Persian leopards, our projections clearly suggest that there is a large potential for a viable metapopulation in the Caucasus, but only if major conservation actions are taken towards reducing persecution and restoring prey.

Aim:Populations of large ungulates are dwindling worldwide. This is especially so for wild sheep, which compete with livestock for forage, are disturbed by shepherds and their dogs, and are exposed to disease transmissions from livestock. Our aim was to assess spatial patterns in realized niche overlap between wild and domestic sheep to better understand where potential competition might arise, and thus to identify priority areas for wild sheep recovery. Location: Southern Caucasus (220,000 km 2 ). Methods: We studied Gmelin's mouflon (Ovis orientalis gmelinii), an ancestor of domestic sheep, to investigate seasonal habitat use and niche overlap with domestic sheep. To map habitat, we analysed mouflon occurrences collected during 2006-2016, and domestic sheep occurrences from shepherd camp locations digitized on high-resolution satellite imagery. We mapped areas of potential competition between mouflon and domestic sheep and assessed potential habitat displacement. Results: Mouflon and domestic sheep niches overlapped substantially (overlap index I = 0.89, where 1 means perfect overlap) but were not identical. Mouflon habitat was less widespread than domestic sheep habitat (14,000 vs. 40,270 km 2 ) and tended to be located in more rugged areas with less vegetation cover. We identified 51 priority patches as reintroduction candidates if grazing pressure and poaching were reduced. Main conclusions: Our results suggest that competition with domestic sheep might have pushed mouflon into marginal habitat. Thus, conservation efforts focusing on current mouflon habitat might miss suitable reintroduction sites. We demonstrate that a combined habitat model for wild and domestic sheep can identify generalsheep habitat, which might be more useful for conservation planning than understanding current mouflon habitat selection. Our results highlight that considering competition with livestock is important for large ungulate conservation, both in terms of reactive (e.g., lessening livestock pressure in prime habitat) and proactive strategies (e.g., reintroduction in areas with low contemporary overlap).

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