Resumen de Global patterns in wolf ecology: implications for management
Environmental authorities, conservation professionals, and several other social sectors frequently demand scientifically sound information to inform policy and decision-making processes. Beyond national or subnational conservation laws, biodiversity conservation increasingly relies on international agreements and commitments, through which sovereign nations commit to share part of their duties and responsibilities in conservation issues. In this pyramidal structure of multi-governance layers, the use of the best available evidence is of paramount importance to effectively adapt general statements contained in general laws or regulations into specific contexts. Using wolves (Canis lupus) as case study, this thesis explores the interface between ecology and policy-making in wildlife conservation and management at different spatial and governance scales. The thesis combines empirical evidence, focused on wolf breeding site attributes and livestock depredations by wolves, literature reviews and in-deep analyses of conservation and management instruments in order to critically assess how evidence is used to develop site-specific management actions, and the way forward to improve policy implementations and effectiveness. The thesis provides an illustrative example of how unveiling general ecological patterns and sources of variation from empirical datasets can provide valuable information to policy decision-makers. In particular, Chapter 1 analyses global patterns in breeding site selection by wolves regarding their vulnerability to humans. Remarkable findings from this chapter are the relationship between the strength of the response (selection of refuge vegetation and avoidance of exposed areas) and the human population density as a surrogate of human pressure. In addition, continental differences are described, being the selection towards more secluded and remote areas stronger in Eurasia than in North America, which denote differences in coexistence history. By identifying global patterns and context-dependent sources of variability on this issue, Chapter 2 explores whether current mandates to protect wolf breeding sites at the European level are translated effectively into domestic management instruments. The need of a more accurate transposition from general commitments to taxon-specific management instruments at the local scale is underlined. Chapter 3 explores the widely assumed positive relationship between the number of wolves and the number of livestock attacks, and shows that the history of coexistence can explain remarkable differences between territories, undermining the general assumption that the increase in wolf population size will translate into higher human-wolf conflict levels. Generally, traditional husbandry techniques oriented to minimize wolf predation on livestock seem to persist in areas where wolves have not been extirpated during the second half of the 20th century and could explain the disassociation of attacks on livestock from wolf abundance in these areas. Chapter 4 goes further with the impact of wolves on livestock conducting a critical test of the frequently used assumption of the existence of negative correlation between wild prey abundance and the number of livestock depredations. We test this assumption with field observations in a particular context from northwest Spain. This thesis calls the attention on the importance of local knowledge and contexts when implementing management and conservation interventions, in order to avoid a lack of effectiveness or undesired outcomes when local management actions are grounded on general assumptions. Nonetheless, it also demonstrates that when this site-specific knowledge is not available, compiling data from multiple contexts to extract general patterns can also be useful to assist decision-making.
