Deer density drives habitat use of establishing wolves in the Western European Alps

1. The return of top carnivores to their historical range triggers conflicts with the interests of different stakeholder groups. Anticipating such conflicts is key to appropriate conservation management, which calls for reliable spatial predictions of future carnivore occurrence. Previous models have assessed general habitat suitability for wolves, but the factors driving the settlement of dispersing individuals remain ill-understood. In particular, little attention has been paid to the role of prey availability in the recolonization process. 2. High-spatial-resolution, area-wide relative densities of the wolf’s main ungulate prey species (red deer, roe deer and chamois) were assessed from snow-track surveys and modelled along with wolf presence data and other environmental descriptors to identify the main drivers of habitat selection of re-establishing wolves in the Western European Alps. 3. Prey species abundance was estimated from the minimum number of individuals recorded from snow-...

1. 顶级食肉动物回归其历史分布区会引发与不同利益相关群体利益的冲突。预判此类冲突是制定合理保护管理策略的关键，这需要对食肉动物未来分布进行可靠的空间预测。以往模型已评估了狼的总体栖息地适宜性，但驱动扩散个体定居的因素仍知之甚少。尤其值得注意的是，猎物可获得性在重新定殖过程中的作用尚未得到足够关注。2. 通过雪迹调查评估了狼的主要有蹄类猎物物种（马鹿、狍、岩羚羊）的高空间分辨率全域相对密度，并将其与狼存在数据及其他环境描述因子一并建模，以识别西欧阿尔卑斯山脉重新定殖狼群栖息地选择的主要驱动因素。