Data from: 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 chance
observations were used to define the expected lynx distribution and guide
the extent of systematic camera trapping surveys, involving between 63 and
101 hunters each year. In southern Slovenia, the core of the lynx
population, lynx density doubled during the reinforcement period (from
0.66 to 1.30 lynx/100 km²). In north-western Slovenia, where a
stepping-stone population in the Alps was established in 2021, the number
of lynx increased to 7. Furthermore, all three translocated females
reproduced, which represents the first confirmed lynx reproduction in the
Slovenian Alps in over 150 years. We discuss the motivation behind the
hunters’ contribution to the data collection process and the implications
of this collaboration. We highlight the importance of maintaining the
collaboration and their support for lynx conservation. This study serves
as an example for large-scale collaborative monitoring of a recovering
population undergoing intensive conservation measures with promising
results, involving crucial stakeholders as citizen scientists.