Environmental impact assessment for large carnivores: a methodological review of the wolf (Canis lupus) monitoring in Portugal

The continuous growth of the global human population results in increased use and change of landscapes, with infrastructures like transportation or energy facilities, being a particular risk to large carnivores. Environmental Impact Assessments were established to identify the probable environmental consequences of any new proposed project, find ways to reduce impacts, and provide evidence to inform decision making and mitigation. Portugal has a wolf population of around 300 individuals, designated as an endangered species with full legal protection. They occupy the northern mountainous areas of the country which has also been the focus of new human infrastructures over the last 20 years. Consequently, dozens of wolf monitoring programs have been established to evaluate wolf population status, to identify impacts, and to inform appropriate mitigation or compensation measures. We reviewed Portuguese wolf monitoring programs to answer four key questions: do wolf programs examine adequate ..., We reviewed all major wolf monitoring programs developed for environmental impact assessments in Portugal since 2002 (Table S1, Supplementary material). Given that the focus here is on the adequacy of targeted wolf monitoring for delivering conclusions about the effects of infrastructure development, we reviewed only monitoring programs that were specifically designed for wolves and not those concerned with general mammalian assessment.
The starting point was a compilation from the 2019-2021 National Wolf Census (Pimenta et al., 2023), where every wolf monitoring program that occurred between 2014 and 2019 in Portugal was identified. The list was completed with projects that started before 2014 or after 2019 based on personal knowledge, inquires to principal scientific teams, governmental agencies, and EIA consultants. Depending on duration, wolf monitoring programs can produce several, usually annual, reports that are not peer-reviewed and do not appear on standard search engines (e.g...., , # Environmental impact assessment and large carnivores: a methodological review of the wolf (*Canis lupus*) monitoring in Portugal.

This is a compilation of 30 wolf monitoring programs for Environmental Impact Assessment that occurred in Portugal between 2002 and 2022.

We characterized and quantified four components of each wolf monitoring program, namely: (1) *biological parameters*, i.e., what wolf variables were meant to be studied to assess impacts; (2) *study design*, i.e., what schemes were followed to collect data in the field; (3) *data collection*, i.e., which methodologies and effort was used to collect data from the field; (4) *data analysis*, i.e., how data from the field were used to estimate relevant parameters and assess impacts on the species.

* The Tab \"Projects_Review\" corresponds to a descriptive breakdown of the reviewed projects.
* The Tab \"Data\" corresponds to a numerical breakdown of the reviewed projects, used in descriptive statistics and graphs. In the \"...