Wolf depredation hotspots in France: Clustering analyses accounting for livestock availability

Abstract

Depredation hotspots are the main source of conflict between humans and large carnivores. When locating depredation hotspots, previous studies have not adjusted for livestock availability, making it impossible for managers to discriminate hotspots resulting from underlying livestock clustering from those due to other factors such as environmental factors. We studied hotspots of wolf depredation on sheep in France from the beginning of wolf recolonisation in 1994, up to 2018. For each year, we used spatial statistical analyses to determine the general depredation spatial pattern, then to locate depredation hotspots. We quantified the discrepancies between the analyses accounting or not for livestock availability. We showed that ignoring livestock availability led to flawed inference about the depredation pattern, and resulted in a substantial number of unidentified hotspots, generally encompassing pastoral surfaces with small sheep availability. Our results indicated that some large hotspots persisted in space and time whereas the distribution of depredations elsewhere in the study area tended to randomness and produced sporadic hotspots. Synthesis and applications. Our methodology provides reliable information for managers to grasp the depredation pattern, to allocate resources and to evaluate management efficiency. In areas where depredations significantly persist, investigation on vulnerability is recommended.

Spatio-temporal dynamics of attacks around deaths of wolves: A statistical assessment of lethal control efficiency in France

“…We used the packages RColorBrewer 1.1-3 (Neuwirth, 2022), tidyterra 0.4.0 (Hernangómez, 2023), geodata 0.5-8 (Hijmans et al, 2023), scales 1.2.1 (Wickham and Seidel, 2022), ggfx 1.0.1 (Pedersen, 2022a), ggnewscale 0.4.9 (Campitelli, 2023), metR 0.14.1 (Campitelli, 2021), patchwork 1.1.2 (Pedersen, 2022b) and ggtext 0.1.2 (Wilke and Wiernik, 2022) for data vizualisation. The datasets, codes and results are available online (Grente et al, 2024).…”

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

“…Standards for available studies vary considerably, but excluding studies with flawed design still shows weak or uncertain effects of lethal control (Treves et al., 2016). Previous studies that have explored the relationship between lethal control (mainly carried out by agency authorities; i.e., culling) and livestock depredation have offered contrasting results (e.g., Bradley et al., 2015; DeCesare et al., 2018; Santiago‐Avila et al., 2018), even when using the same dataset (Kompaniyets & Evans, 2017; Poudyal et al., 2016; Wielgus & Peebles, 2014) and being complex to synthesize a general and unique effect (Grente, 2021).…”