Hunter-engaged monitoring of the Eurasian lynx during the reinforcement process

Collaborative wildlife monitoring programs involving citizen scientists are an efficient approach for surveying large areas. In Europe, hunters play an important role in wildlife monitoring and act as crucial stakeholders in large carnivore conservation. The Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), an elusive felid, is a species of conservation concern in Europe. In Slovenia, the lynx was exterminated and later reintroduced in 1973, but the population has declined over the past decades. A reinforcement program was initiated in 2017, translocating lynx from the Carpathian population to improve the critically endangered status of the Dinaric population. The reinforcement was coupled with an intensive monitoring programme, involving local hunters as key participants. In this study, we show how the collaboration between wildlife managers, researchers, and hunters resulted in a robust assessment of the lynx population at a national level over five years. Questionnaires distributed to hunting clubs and cha..., , , # Data from: Hunter-engaged monitoring of the Eurasian lynx during the reinforcement process

This README file describes the provided dataset for the multi-session spatial capture-recapture (SCR) analyses for density and abundance estimation of the Dinaric Eurasian lynx population in Slovenia.

**Description of the data and file structure**

**File name: tdf_1823.csv**

* This dataset contains the information required to run the SCR models, accordingly to our paper. It includes the trap deployment data for survey seasons 2018-2019 to 2022-2023.
* Format(s): .csv
* Size(s): 265 KB
* Dimensions: 192 columns and 652 rows
* Variables:

trap_ID - a unique identifier for a camera trap station within a given survey year
* X - Longitude of the camera trap station in crs=3794, divided by 1000
and rounded to 1 decimal place due to sensitive biological information
* Y - Latitude of the camera trap station in crs=3794, divided by 1000 and rounded to 1 decimal place due to sensitive biological ...,