130925-studie-wildlife-comeback-in-europe

Figure 2.
Distribution of Brown
bear in Switzerland
in 1700, 1800, 1850,
1900 and 1950 [18] .
Figure 3.
Distribution of Brown
bear in Finland in
1700, 1900 and
2001 [8, 17] . Between
1700 and 1900,
ranges halved in
Finland but by 2000,
around 91% of the
original range was
considered bear
country.
of the main current threats to the species within
Europe [7] and there is no current information
on Russian bears [13] . It is, however, reasonable to
assume that legal protection and the control of
exploitation and hunting has likely been one of
the greatest factors in the initial bear recovery
(Table 3). In Sweden, for example, it is believed that
the establishment of lower hunting quotas from
1981 has contributed to the tremendous growth of
the country’s populations since [2] .
Naturally, obtaining an accurate measure of
the health of wide-ranging species such as the
Brown bear across Europe is complex. Some recent
regional and national trends tell the same story:
an increasing abundance trend in the Finnish
population matches an expanding range (Figure 4),
and we found an overall decline in the abundance
of the Critically Endangered Cantabrian bear
population, which faces a number of threats,
including low densities and lack of connecting
corridors [12] . Others, on the other hand, show mixed
fortunes, e.g. an increase is apparently occurring at
the same time as a range contraction in Bulgaria
(not shown), although this may be attributable to
the large time gap in the spatial data (1900 and 2001).
Smaller temporal bands may indeed yield similar
results. This suggests that local management is
likely to be of great importance to dealing with
the steadily increasing European populations, and
supports the need for an integrated programme
of management, with local rewilding sites playing
key roles, particularly in creating interconnected
networks for wide-ranging species.
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