The Past as a Wrong Baseline for Future Conservation: Alternatives to the Use of Historical Distributions for Cataloguing the Threat Status of Large Carnivores

Abstract

[Abstract] The use of historical information can be valuable for guiding conservation, but past distributions do not need to be an appropriate baseline for future conservation efforts. We analysed a specific criterion of the current Spanish legislation that assigns threat status based on species distribution range at the beginning of the 20th century, and apply it to grey wolves to assess its feasibility. We suggest that the past distribution of wolves was strongly conditioned by a) the regional scarcity of wild ungulates, and b) the common occurrence of large herds of sheep outdoors. However, both conditions have changed substantially over time. Large wild herbivores are rebounding across many European countries including Spain, whilst large numbers of sheep are no longer available for wolves in many regions, mainly due to socioecological land-use and husbandry model changes. We predict that in the future, densities of wolves will be more strongly spatially correlated with the density of wild prey than with that of livestock, and that they will be concomitant with degree of social tolerance. Areas encompassing such conditions may or may not coincide with historical wolf ranges. Our points are also discussed in relation to Iberian lynx and brown bears in Spain. We suggest that the legal criteria for the conservation of large carnivores should be modified accordingly to account for other determinants of occurrence, rather than focusing on aiming to recover past distribution ranges as the main target. Similar considerations can be applied to other world regions where policy stresses historical range recovery as a major cataloguing criterion of threat status.