Results

Recommendations

The EuroLargeCarnivores project team met, discussed and collaborated with more than three thousand people living and working with large carnivores. We have tried to learn from everyone we encountered about the challenges involved: from the overworked damage inspector showing us over one thousand photographs of livestock carcasses, to government officials scrambling to work out how to best implement the EU Habitats Directive, the shepherd in a panic after a wolf pack attacked his livestock at nightfall and the scientist struggling for decades to convince their colleagues across the border to use the same monitoring protocol. These are just a few examples.  

Our recommendations are to focus on actions that are easily achievable but will have the biggest impact according to our experiences from during the project period. We have also developed Standard Operating Procedures “SOPs” that contain case studies and recommended examples for specific aspects of large carnivore management that have been identified by the stakeholders of the EuroLargeCarnivores project as being successful, or at least very promising, in different European countries. They provide information about different types and aspects of governance for new situations that have developed due to the increased presence of large carnivores and encompass technical, economic, social, educational, and political best-practice innovations. The three overarching themes addressed are risk and damage prevention, monitoring of large carnivores, and species management at individual and population level.