Christophe Duchamp

Office Français de la Biodiversité · Science and expertise

Wolves have large spatial requirements and their expansion in Europe is occurring over national boundaries, hence the need to develop monitoring programs at the population level. Wolves in the Alps are defined as a functional population and management unit. The range of this wolf Alpine population now covers seven countries: Italy, France, Austria,...

Connectivity shapes species distribution across fragmented landscapes. Assessing landscape resistance to dispersal is challenging because dispersal events are rare and difficult to detect especially for elusive species. To address these issues, spatial occupancy models have been developed to integrate the resistance surface concept of landscape eco...

Over the past 30 years, the gray wolf population has recovered in France, initially to wolves from Italy passing through the Alps. The population is carefully monitored, but little information is available on their helminth fauna, which includes parasites of public health importance: Echinococcus multilocularis and Echinococcus granulosus sensu lat...

1. To document and halt biodiversity loss, monitoring, quantifying trends and assessing management and conservation strategies on wildlife populations and communities are crucial steps. 2. With increasing technological innovations, more and more data are collected and new quantitative methods are constantly developed. These rapid developments come...

L’efficacité des tirs létaux de Loups gris (Canis lupus Linnaeus, 1758) à réduire la prédation de cette espèce sur les troupeaux domestiques est débattue, que cela soit en France ou ailleurs où ces mesures sont appliquées. Dans cet article, nous résumons les résultats de la thèse d’Oksana Grente, réalisée sous la direction de l’Office français de l...

L’incertitude persiste au sujet de l’efficacité des prélèvements létaux de loup à réduire la prédation de cette espèce sur les troupeaux domestiques, que cela soit en France ou ailleurs où ces mesures sont appliquées. Dans cet article, nous résumons les résultats de la thèse d'Oksana Grente réalisée sous la direction de l’Office Français de la Biod...

Monitoring standards and strategy to optimise the integrated monitoring of the status of the wolf alpine population. On behalf of the LIFE WolfAlps project

Areas exhibiting high levels of predations on livestock generate conflicts between humans and large carnivores. Managers generally seek to identify these hotspots, in order to diagnose the causes that lead to hotspot formations and to provide financial or technical support to the involved livestock owners. When locating depredation hotspots, previo...

Persistence of viable populations may be uncertain for large carnivore species, especially for those established in human-dominated landscapes. Here, we studied the Eurasian lynx in Western Europe established in the Upper Rhine metapopulation (i.e., Jura, Vosges-Palatinian and Black Forest populations) and in the Alpine population. These population...

Sharing space with large carnivores on a human-dominated continent like Europe results in multiple conflictful interactions with human interests, of which depredation on livestock is the most widespread. We conducted an analysis of the impact by all four European large carnivores on sheep farming in 10 European countries, during the period 2010-201...

Deep learning is used in computer vision problems with important applications in several scientific fields. In ecology for example, there is a growing interest in deep learning for automatizing repetitive analyses on large amounts of images, such as animal species identification. However, there are challenging issues toward the wide adoption of dee...

Les Journées ITTECOP se sont tenues les 25 et 26 mars 2021 en distanciel. Elles ont été l'occasion de présenter les résultats des projets issus de l'APR 2017 et les nouvelles recherches de l'APR 2020. Organisées autour de six sessions, une large place a été offerte aux échanges entre chercheurs et acteurs opérationnels.

A detection dog and handler team were used to recover scats in areas newly colonized by wolves outside the Alpine mountains of France between October 2018 and May 2019. Survey areas were classified as occupied by a resident wolf pack (WP) or dispersers (no-WP). The efficiency of monitoring by a targeted doghandler team was compared to opportunistic...

Depredation hotspots are the main source of conflict between humans and large carnivores. When locating depredation hotspots, previous studies have not adjusted for livestock availability, making it impossible for managers to discriminate hotspots resulting from underlying livestock clustering from those due to other factors such as environmental f...

The occurrence of wolf populations in human-dominated landscapes is challenging worldwide because of conflicts with human activities. Modeling is an important tool to project wolf dynamics and expansion, and help in decision making concerning management and conservation. However, some individual behaviors and pack dynamics of the wolf life cycle ar...

En France, la protection des troupeaux contre les attaques de loup prévoit l’utilisation de tirs dérogatoires dans des contextes précis, notamment lorsque la pression des attaques est forte. Néanmoins, les effets de ces tirs sur les attaques restent mal connus. Nous dressons ici un état des connaissances scientifiques sur le sujet puis présentons l...

Baylisascaris procyonis is a zoonotic nematode whose main definitive host is the raccoon, an invasive carnivore in Europe introduced from the United States. B. procyonis causes larva migrans with poor prognosis in humans. This parasite was unexpectedly detected in France for the first time upon molecular screening of wolf faecal samples. Because no...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are important statistical tools for ecologists to understand and predict species range. However, standard SDMs do not explicitly incorporate dynamic processes like dispersal. This limitation may lead to bias in inference about species distribution. Here, we adopt the theory of ecological diffusion that has recentl...

The occurrence of wolf populations in human-dominated landscapes is challenging worldwide because of conflicts with human activities. Modeling is an important tool to predict wolf dynamics and expansion, and help in decision making concerning management and conservation. However, some individual behaviors and pack dynamics of the wolf life cycle ar...

Species distribution models (SDMs) are important statistical tools for ecologists to understand and predict species range. However, standard SDMs do not explicitly incorporate dynamic processes like dispersal. This limitation may lead to bias in inference about species distribution. Here, we adopt the theory of ecological diffusion that has recentl...

Abstract Obtaining estimates of animal population density is a key step in providing sound conservation and management strategies for wildlife. For many large carnivores however, estimating density is difficult because these species are elusive and wide‐ranging. Here, we focus on providing the first density estimates of the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx...

Reliable density estimates are the cornerstone of effective conservation and management planning. For large carnivores however, estimating density is difficult because these species are elusive and wide-ranging. Here, we focus on the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) in the French Jura and Vosges Mountains (Mts) and provide the first density estimates. We...

Large carnivores are wide-ranging species, highly mobile and live in human-dominated landscapes where habitat destruction and fragmentation are important threats. In parallel, the terrestrial transportation network is getting denser and acts as a barrier for the movement of these animals as well as it increases the risk of collisions. The Eurasian...

Large carnivores are wide-ranging species, highly mobile and live in human-dominated landscapes where habitat destruction and fragmentation are important threats. In parallel, the terrestrial transportation network is getting denser and acts as a barrier for the movement of these animals as well as it increases the risk of collisions. In this cont...

Lettre d'information Trame verte et bleue n°38 Date: 25 avril 2018 Lettre d'information nationale sur la Trame verte et bleue Agence française pour la biodiversité http://www.trameverteetbleue.fr/vie-tvb/lettre-information/38

With large carnivores recovering in Europe, assessing their distribution can help mitigating conflicts with human activities. Because they are highly mobile, elusive and live at very low density, their monitoring is difficult. To address this challenge, we used Citizen Sciences (CS) that allow collecting data that can outperform in intensity and co...

While large carnivores are recovering in Europe, assessing their distributions can help to predict and mitigate conflicts with human activities. Because they are highly mobile, elusive and live at very low density, modeling their distributions presents several challenges due to 1) their imperfect detectability, 2) their dynamic ranges over time and...

While large carnivores are recovering in Europe, assessing their distributions can help to predict and mitigate conflicts with human activities. Because they are highly mobile, elusive and live at very low density, modeling their distributions presents several challenges due to i) their imperfect detectability, ii) their dynamic ranges over time an...

Accessible at: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10344-014-0825-0 Diseases likely affect large carnivore demography and can hinder conservation efforts. We considered three highly contagious viruses that infect a wide range of domestic and wild mammals: canine parvovirus type 2 (CPV-2), canine distemper virus (CDV) and canine enteric coro...

Under increasing environmental and financial constraints, ecologists are faced with making decisions about dynamic and uncertain biological systems. To do so, stochastic dynamic programming ( SDP ) is the most relevant tool for determining an optimal sequence of decisions over time. Despite an increasing number of applications in ecology, SDP still...

a b s t r a c t Stage-structured matrix models are commonly used to inform management decisions for species with complex life cycles. These models require information on the number or proportion of individuals in each stage. However, complex life cycles, such as those in species exhibiting a complex social organization, can make these data difficul...

The wolf recovery in France dates back to 1992, following the natural range expansion of the remaining Italian population since the late 1960's. Facing a high level of interactions between wolves and sheep breeding, decision makers had to quickly balance the need for managing livestock depredations with the conservation of wolves as a protected spe...

Managing large carnivores is one of the most controversial issues in wildlife conservation, as the sociopolitical challenges it raises are as important as the biological ones. Such controversial issues in wildlife conservation require objective biological components to be implemented within the management decision process, in particular, a reliable...

As part of the survey of the pan-alpine population of Eurasian Lynx, the French national network of large carnivores experts collected N = 301 data, out of which 159 (n 1 = 2 C1, n 2 = 62 C2, n 3 = 95 C3) were regarded robust enough from a technical point of view to evidence the presence of lynx (compared to 224 data in the previous pentad). Such a...

An estimate of changes in a species’ distribution range is a key variable in assessing its conservation status. It may be based on the direct detection of individuals, or on the use of indirect presence sign surveys. In both cases, the process requires one to switch from a point-based approach, where individuals/presence signs are located using a c...

Assessing conservation strategies requires reliable estimates of abundance. Because detecting all individuals is most often impossible in free-ranging populations, estimation procedures have to account for a <1 detection probability. Capture-recapture methods allow biologists to cope with this issue of detectability. Nevertheless, capture-recapture...

Wolves in Italy strongly declined in the past and were confined south of the Alps since the turn of the last century, reduced in the 1970s to approximately 100 individuals surviving in two fragmented subpopulations in the central-southern Apennines. The Italian wolves are presently expanding in the Apennines, and started to recolonize the western A...

Within the SCALP framework, the status of the pan-alpine population of Eurasian Lynx is assessed every 5 years, based on the compilation of national reports and standardized classification of lynx presence signs according to data confidence levels (C1, C2, C3). From2000 to 2004, the French national network of lynx experts collected N= 393 data, out o...