Skandulv: Ecology and management of the Scandinavian wolf

Wolves exert important effects on the Scandinavian ecosystem including interactions with other species, impact on prey populations, and on the harvest yield of game species resulting in hard-solved conflicts with humans and pose challenges for balancing conservation and management on a local, national, and EU perspective.

We identify two sections that are particularly important for the future management of the Scandinavian wolf population: 1) effects of human harvest on local density, spatial distribution, population growth, and demography, 2) effects of spatial variation in population density on dispersal, immigration, and movements, and its consequences for trans-border management.

We will examine how previous harvest has impacted on the population size and development. We will also estimate the time to re-establishment and reproduction of wolf territories following harvest of one or several individual wolves or of entire packs and how this varies spatially and with the local density of wolf territories. We will test if the size of harvest has affected an important population parameter in terms of generation time in the population.

To explain the causes and consequences of the uneven spatial distribution of wolf territories in the population we will 1) study the dispersal pattern and establishment of wolves in Scandinavia and 2) examine the implications of the uneven distribution (density effects) of wolf territories within the population for their mobility and space use (territory size). Finally, we will investigate the temporal variation in immigration of sub-adult wolves into the population and how the frequency of immigration is associated with the population size and range in Finland and/or Russia.

These studies lead to better understanding of how variable management actions at different spatial scales work in this population. The results also have important implications for the shared management of the population between Norway, Sweden, and Finland/Russia.

Håkan Sand, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

2 995 000 SEK

Wolves exert important effects on the Scandinavian ecosystem including interactions with other species, impact on prey populations, and on the harvest yield of game species resulting in hard-solved conflicts with humans. This pose challenges for management on both a national and an EU perspective, including the cross-border region between Sweden and Norway, and requires a science-based adaptive management approach. Here we focus on the effect of harvest on demographic and genetic traits, and on the growth and spatial distribution, of the population. We will examine how long it takes for territories to re-establish and pairs to reproduce after the harvest of one or several individual wolves or of entire packs and how this is this associated with the local density of wolf territories. We will also test if harvest affect important population parameters such as individual breeding success and the generation time in the population. Another focus is the pattern of dispersal, establishment, and immigration of sub-adult wolves in the population, the mechanisms important to this pattern and its consequences for trans-border management. Related to this is the implications of the uneven distribution within the population for behavioral and demographic traits. We emphasize the need for obtaining empirical demographic data from collared individuals to improve our understanding of the mechanistic drivers of growth in the Scandinavian wolf population. Central to this part is to obtain more data on specific causes to mortality including poaching and to test what environmental factors that link to these mortality causes. Finally, we focus our research on how wolves interact with two other large carnivores in Scandinavia, brown bears and wolverines, to what extent wolves locally impact on human harvest of their main prey (moose), and how wolf diet change with geographical variation in prey species composition.

Håkan Sand, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

1 200 000 SEK