She is aConservation Scientist specialized in macroecology and biogeography, and is currently working to quantitate vegetation shifts under climatic change in extreme biomes such as the tundra and the savannah.

Contemporary efforts to protect biological diversity recognize the importance of sustaining traditional human livelihoods, particularly uses of the land that are compatible with intact landscapes and ecologically complete food webs. However, these efforts often confront conflicting goals. For example, conserving native predators may harm pastoralist economies because predators consume domestic livestock that sustain people. This potential conflict must be reconciled by policy, but such reconciliation requires a firm understanding of the effects of predators on the prey used by people. We used a long-term, large-scale database and Bayesian models to estimate the impacts of lynx (Lynx lynx), wolverine (Gulo gulo), and brown bear (Ursus arctos) on harvest of semi-domesticated reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) by Sami pastoralists in Sweden. The average annual harvest of reindeer averaged 25% of the population (95% credible interval = 19, 31). Annual harvest declined by 96.6 (31, 155) reindeer for each lynx family group (the surveyed segment of the lynx population) in a management unit and by 94.3 (20, 160) for each wolverine reproduction (the surveyed segment of the wolverine population). We failed to detect effects of predation by brown bear. The mechanism for effects of predation on harvest was reduced population growth rate. The rate of increase of reindeer populations declined with increasing abundance of lynx and wolverine. The density of reindeer, latitude, and weather indexed by the North Atlantic Oscillation also influenced reindeer population growth rate. We conclude that there is a biological basis for compensating the Sámi reindeer herders for predation on reindeer.

Efficient conservation of wide-ranging carnivores requires that adaptive management consider the varying ecological and societal conditions within the entire range of a population. In northern Europe, large carnivore management has to balance carnivore conservation and maintaining the indigenous reindeer-herding culture. Wolverine Gulo gulo monitoring and management in Sweden is currently focused on alpine reindeer husbandry areas where wolverine abundance and associated depredation conflicts have been highest. However, this focus ignores a potential southwards population expansion because current monitoring relies on snow-based tracking methods that are not applicable outside northern alpine areas. Thus, in this study we: (1) used available monitoring data from 1996 to 2014 in Sweden to assess wolverine distribution trends in relation to national management goals, and (2) evaluate the current monitoring protocol against the use of camera stations as an alternative, snow-independent, method for detecting wolverine presence at the southern periphery of its distribution. We show that the wolverine population in Sweden has expanded considerably into the boreal forest landscape, and colonized areas without reindeer husbandry and persistent spring snow cover. The latter indicates a less strict relationship between wolverine distribution and snow cover than previously hypothesized. Current management continues to use a monitoring protocol that is only adapted to high-conflict alpine areas, and is not adapting to changing conditions in the population range, which creates a problematic scale mismatch. Consequently, national management decisions are currently based on incomplete population information, as roughly a third of wolverine's range is not included in official population estimates, which could have detrimental consequences for conflict mitigation and conservation efforts. This illustrates that an important key to successful carnivore conservation is flexible management that considers the entire range of conditions at the appropriate regional and temporal scales under which carnivores, environment and people interact.

Home range (HR) size variation is often linked to resource abundance, with sex differences expected to relate to sex‐specific fitness consequences. However, studies generally fail to disentangle the effects of the two main drivers of HR size variation, food and conspecific density, and rarely consider how their relative influence change over spatiotemporal scales. We used location data from 77 Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) from a 16‐year Scandinavian study to examine HR sizes variation relative to prey and conspecific density at different spatiotemporal scales. By varying the isopleth parameter (intensity of use) defining the HR, we show that sex‐specific effects were conditional on the spatial scale considered. Males had larger HRs than females in all seasons. Females' total HR size declined as prey and conspecific density increased, whereas males' total HR was only affected by conspecific density. However, as the intensity of use within the HR increased (from 90% to 50% isopleth), the relationship between prey density and area showed opposing patterns for females and males; for females, the prey density effect was reduced, while for males, prey became increasingly important. Thus, prey influenced the size of key regions within male HRs, despite total HR size being independent of prey density. Males reduced their HR size during the mating season, likely to remain close to individual females in estrous. Females reduced their HR size postreproduction probably because of movement constrains imposed by dependent young. Our findings highlight the importance of simultaneously considering resources and intraspecific interactions as HR size determinants. We show that sex‐specific demands influence the importance of prey and conspecific density on space use at different spatiotemporal scales. Thus, unless a gradient of space use intensity is examined, factors not related to total HR size might be disregarded despite their importance in determining size of key regions within the HR.