The spatial distribution and temporal trends of livestock damages caused by wolves in Europe

Abstract

SummaryWolf populations are recovering and expanding across Europe, causing conflicts with livestock owners. To mitigate these conflicts and reduce livestock damages, authorities spend considerable resources to compensate damages, support damage prevention measures, and manage wolf populations. However, the effectiveness of these measures remains largely unknown, especially at larger geographic scales. Here we compiled incident-based livestock damage data across 21 countries for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020, during which 39,445 wolf-caused incidents were reported from 470 NUTS3 regions. We found substantial regional variation in all aspects of the data, including the primary target species, the density of damages, their seasonal distribution, and their temporal trend. About one third of the variation in damage densities is explained by the area of heterogeneous landscapes consisting of forests and extensively cultivated habitats occupied by wolves. However, most of the variation remains unexplained, illustrating the inherently stochastic nature of wolf-caused livestock damages and regional variation in husbandry practices, including damage prevention measures. As we argue, the intensity of the wolf-human conflict may be monitored through trends in livestock damages, which are robust to variation in data collection across regions. We estimated increasing trends for the majority of regions, reflecting the current expansion of wolves across the continent. Nonetheless, many of these increases were moderate and for more than one third of all regions, trends were negative despite a growing wolf populations, thus indicating that wolf-livestock conflicts can be successfully mitigated with proper management.

Testing a conservation compromise: No evidence that public wolf hunting in Slovakia reduced livestock losses

“…Such evidence is of paramount importance as the recent recovery of wolves across EU Member States, excluding islands (Boitani et al, 2022;Chapron et al, 2014) has intensified the debate on the liberalization of strict wolf protection due to the social conflicts arising from livestock depredation (e.g., Kiffner et al, 2019). Compared to North America, domestic ungulates are a more common food source for wolves in Europe (Newsome et al, 2016;Singer et al, 2023).…”