Assessment of the conservation status of the Wolf (Canis lupus) in Europe

摘要: In the last 50 years, wolf populations across Europe have shown a remarkable capacity to take advantage of changing circumstances and landscapes and of new opportunities to reoccupy large areas of suitable habitat. In the last decade only, an increase of over 25% of wolf range has been reported in Europe (Cimatti et al., 2021). After having experienced a severe reduction in the first half of the 20th century, the wolf has become a protected species in many European countries where it had not been extirpated and from where it underwent a relatively rapid increase (Chapron et al., 2014). This expansion is still continuing and has been supported by a set of international conventions, which modified the wolf status from that of pest species to conservation priority, creating the conditions for their legal protection at the national level. The expansion was mainly due to a series of larger social, economic and historical processes, such as reforestation and the progressive abandonment of agricultural land (Cimatti et al., 2021), which reduced human impacts and released space for large carnivores and their wild ungulate prey. The return of the wolf in so many countries, though, does not come without an impact on human activities. On one hand, given the absence of large areas of wilderness in Europe (Venter et al., 2016), wolves have almost entirely re-established their populations in highly humanmodified landscapes, where humans raise livestock, hunt wild ungulates, and use forests and mountains for tourism and recreation (Chapron et al., 2014, Bautista et al., 2019). Currently, permanent wolf ranges are characterised by an average density of 90 …