Bringing Large Mammals Back: Large Carnivores in Europe

By L. Boitani, J. Linnell. 2015

115 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The last century has seen a dramatic reversal in the status of large carnivores in Europe. A suite of co-occurring factors has permitted a large-scale recovery of most populations. We currently recognise 10 populations of each species, most of which are transboundary in nature. The sizes of these populations vary from some tens to many thousand, with current estimates being around 17,000 bears, 10,000 wolves and 10,000 lynx in Europe (excluding Russia). As the situation moves from averting extinction to planning recovery it is logical to ask how far the recovery can go, and what our conservation goals should be, especially in light of the emerging rewilding discourse. For a variety of ecological, practical and strategic reasons, it seems unlikely that restoring “wilderness” or “natural ecological processes” (in the sense that human activity and influence are excluded) will serve as general models for large carnivore conservation on a large scale. We suggest a focus on developing a “coexistence” model that aims to create a sustainable interaction between humans and large carnivores by encouraging conservation of these species in very large areas of the European landscape, encouraging the development of a wide range of ecological processes, including predation and scavenging, while accepting that human influence on all trophic levels is pervasive, legitimate, necessary and often even desirable. This constitutes a desire to create a new form of relationship between humans and wildness that has never existed before, and therefore does not fall within the conventional meanings of the rewilding paradigm.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/17e730146577089ad4b7cbbc12150fd0a294a1cf

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In Ecology

In Global and Planetary Change

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Large carnivore damage in Europe: Analysis of compensation and prevention programs (2019, background): “This recent recovery is due to legal protection, reforestation, the recovery of wild prey populations, and an increased social tolerance towards wildlife (Boitani and Linnell, 2015).”
Large carnivore expansion in Europe is associated with human population density and land cover changes (2021, background): “…land abandonment, decrease in natural grassland, increase in forest cover both due to afforestation and reforestation programmes and increased urbanization (Behr et al., 2017; Boitani & Linnell, 2015; Fuchs et al., 2013), with subsequent concentration of the human population in urban areas.”
The challenges and opportunities of coexisting with wild ungulates in the human-dominated landscapes of Europe's Anthropocene (2019, unknown): “…are highly modified by the direct and indirect impacts of humans on all trophic levels, i.e. harvest and modification of vegetation through forestry and agriculture, and hunting and traffic collisions that kill both wild ungulates and carnivores (Boitani and Linnell, 2015; Kuijper et al., 2016).”