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

Abstract

Wolf 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 39,262 wolf-caused incidents were reported from 470 administrative 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. More than half of the variation in damage densities across regions is explained by the area of extensively cultivated habitats occupied by wolves and namely natural grasslands and broad-leaved forests. Regional variation in husbandry practices and damage prevention, while difficult to quantify at a continental scale, appear important factors to further modulate these incidents. As illustrated with detailed data from Germany, for instance, the relationship between the number of wolf units and damages is diminishing over time, suggesting some adaptation of livestock owners and local authorities to their presence, for example by increasing prevention efforts. As we argue, temporal trends of damage incidents, which are robust to variation in data collection across regions, are thus informative about the local intensity of the wolf-human conflict. 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 growing wolf populations, thus indicating that wolf-livestock conflicts can be successfully mitigated with proper management.