A STUDY ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HUMANS, PREY AND PREDATORS
Understanding how ecosystems work in human-dominated landscapes is crucial for effective management, long-term conservation, sustainable development of human activities and to enhance coexistence among humans, domestic animals, and wild animals in Europe’s mountainous landscapes.
The return of the wolf to parts of its historical range occurs now in a landscape that has been profoundly transformed by humans during the decades or centuries of the animal’s absence, leading to conflicts with anthropogenic activities such as livestock rearing and hunting.
Wolf recovery affects various human activities and interests, and viceversa, while triggering social conflicts and differing opinions on wolf management. For solutions of coexistence between wolves and humans to emerge, dialogue and collaboration between stakeholders is vital.
One of the obstacles for coexistence between wolves and humans in the Alps is the real or perceived impact that wolves have on ungulates.
Previous studies highlighted the difficulty of deciphering the complex interactions between prey, predators and their
environments due to the inherent intricacies of these relationships.
Adding human presence into the equation leads to even greater complexity, as landscapes and wildlife interactions are strongly impacted by human activities in ways that are not yet entirely clear.
Humans have hunted animals for thousands of years, and nowadays, in a human-dominated world, we are perceived not only as predators, but also as a source of disturbance, when our presence or activities impact animals even though they are not directly aimed at killing them.
In Europe in particular, predator-prey dynamics are thus embedded within human-modified ecosystems, but little is known about the effects of predation risk in these human-dominated settings.
Within the framework of Action C3, the LIFE WolfAlps EU project team worked in close partnership with hunters to address these knowledge gaps through a coordinated study across the Alps. The objective of the study was to quantify the responses of prey, particularly roe deer, to perceived predation risk by wolf and humans in space and time, while also accounting for the presence of alternative prey (domestic and wild) and alternative predators, in four different sites across the Alps. In the past years several articles were published on the project website to present the developement of the action.
A final booklet was prepared to present the main results obtained during this study thanks to the international collaboration of research teams and the support of hunters in France, Italy and Slovenia.
Click HERE to download the booklet.
Drawing by Gaudenzio Canavese.
