José Vicente López-Bao

Biodiversity Research Institute (CSIC - Oviedo University - Principality of Asturias)

Animals within social groups respond to costs and benefits of sociality by adjusting the proportion of time they spend in close proximity to other individuals in the group (cohesion). Variation in cohesion between individuals, in turn, shapes important group‐level processes such as subgroup formation and fission–fusion dynamics. Although critical t...

Human-caused mortality has been the major cause of death among wolves worldwide. In 2017, we summarized a 33-year data set of >933 Gray Wolf deaths from Wisconsin, United States, and estimated that poaching was the major source of mortality. Roberts et al. (2024; hereafter, just Roberts et al. unless using a direct quote from that paper) challenge...

Most European rewilding initiatives are based on the recovery of large herbivores, particularly European bison Bison bonasus, aiming at restoring ecosystem processes and increase trophic complexity. The growing support for the release of bison as a wild species, and change its legal status, in Spain, as an ecological analogue of the extinct steppe...

Wolves (Canis lupus) exhibit contrasted activity patterns along their distribution range. The shift from diurnal to nocturnal habits within and among populations appears to be primarily driven by localized levels of human activity, with ambivalent responses toward such disturbance reported among populations. Yet, the drivers and the underlying indi...

The Himalayan langur (Semnopithecus species complex) has largely been overlooked by research and conservation in Pakistan. Due to a lack of information, as well as taxonomic disagreement, our knowledge of the Himalayan langur population in Pakistan and its taxonomic standing remains elusive. Previously, the langur population in Pakistan was assigne...

Political responses to the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in city soundscapes around the globe.From March to October 2020, a consortium of 261 contributors from 35 countries brought togetherby the Silent Cities project built a unique soundscape recordings collection to report on local acousticchanges in urban areas. We present this collection her...

Rights of nature laws have been enacted in a growing number of countries, but the extent to which they are supported by public opinion has been unclear. We report the results of a survey in which over 11,000 participants across the EU were asked 'Would you support or oppose policy that would give legal rights to forests or rivers-such as the right...

Una proposición de ley presentada en el Congreso de los Diputados para desproteger al lobo contraviene las obligaciones contraídas por España ante el derecho europeo e internacional y pretende anular las previsiones procedimentales de participación técnica y la intervención de las comunidades autónomas en la modificación del Listado de Especies Sil...

La tendencia de las poblaciones europeas de lobo (Canis lupus) es, en general, estable o en aumento. En España, el estatus jurídico del lobo se ha dividido conforme al río Duero, considerando la fracción de la población al norte del río Duero en el Anexo V de la Directiva Hábitats de 1992, mientras que al sur del río se incluye en el Anexo IV. Prim...

Range expansion is a common feature from invasive to reintroduced or recovering populations. This process is mainly driven by population growth and dispersal and, consequently, different species’ intrinsic characteristics and dispersal mechanisms will result in contrasting population structures in space. How individuals of different sex and age cla...

The report Large carnivore distribution maps and population updates 2017 – 2022/23 is based on the latest information and provides the best available overview of brown bear (Ursus arctos), Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), wolf (Canis lupus), golden jackal (Canis aureus), and wolverine (Gulo gulo) distributions and population sizes at a European continent...

Background Instances of attacks from large carnivores that lead to human injury or death are increasingly reported worldwide. Ensuring human safety when people and carnivores co-occur is central to minimizing human suffering but is also essential to support sustainable carnivore conservation. Various interventions are available intended to alter ei...

The cryptic nature of wildlife crimes, such as poaching, challenges the effective monitoring of their impacts on biodiversity, thus jeopardizing the adequate addressing of this critical threat. Official databases serve as the main sources of information for delineating strategies and actions against wildlife crimes. However, their reliability requi...

Most large carnivore populations have increased in recent decades in Europe. Along with the adoption of the EU Habitats Directive in 1992, the EU launched a funding program entirely dedicated to environment, nature protection and climate action, the European LIFE programme. Here, we explore the investment of this programme in large carnivore conser...

The Cantabrian brown bear (Ursus arctos) population is threatened although in a constant process of recovery during the last 20 years. Since data on the parasitological status of this bear is still limited, the objective of the present study was to assess the diversity and prevalence of parasites in this population. Thus, 111 bear faecal samples we...

Human activities and infrastructures can disturb wildlife and alter their behaviour by triggering anti-predator responses such as changes in time allocation to different behaviours. For instance, disturbance sources like traffic can cause significant variation in allocation of time to vigilance and foraging behaviours , which can be used as sensiti...

Brown bears (Ursus arctos) were extinct in Portugal by 1843. In the spring of 2019, a male bear was officially confirmed in northern Portugal, and more bears will likely reach the country shortly. We surveyed participants in a workshop held in Bragança in October 2021 to understand the perceptions and attitudes of different stakeholder groups (Admi...

Wild cherry (Prunus avium) is a climate-sensitive species of great ecological importance and has gained importance in the diet of the Cantabrian brown bear (Ursus arctos L.) in recent years. Understanding the potential impact of climate change on the distribution of wild cherry and the interactions with bears, specially dispersion to more suitable...

Variation in the legal status and management of wolves ( Canis lupus ) across EU Member States provides a good opportunity to test the effectiveness of different practices to reduce livestock losses. This opportunity for testing is particularly useful for lethal interventions, as they are among the most controversial actions within the large carniv...

The mechanisms by which the degradation of natural habitats influences wild animals can require an understanding of their physiological responses to stressors. The quantification of cortisol, the major glucocorticoid in wolves, in hair is an emerging biomarker of chronic stress in wildlife. We hypothesized that hair cortisol concentration (HCC) can...

This is a letter with the following text: The recovery of the wolf in Europe is one of the rare conservation successes on the continent (1). Instrumental to this recovery has been the strict legal protection of wolves throughout most of their range under Annex IV of the Habitats Directive (2). Strict protection has prevented anti- conservation...

After decades of intense persecution, the Iberian wolf subspecies faced a severe bottleneck in the 1970s that considerably reduced its range and population size, nearly leading to its extinction in central and southern Iberian Peninsula. Such population decline could have impacted the genetic diversity of Iberian wolves through different processes,...

Among large carnivores, wolves show a remarkable capability to persist in human-dominated landscapes. However, the temporal dynamics of variation in spatial use of these landscapes remains poorly understood. Considering the relevance of spatio-temporal variations of territorial marking on wolf behaviour, either to defend territory boundaries and co...

Monitoring compliance with environmental laws is essential to overcoming possible implementation shortfalls jeopardizing their effectiveness. Besides improving our ecological understanding of wildlife, remote tracking technologies also allow us to take advantage of such ecological knowledge to use wildlife as sentinels of compliance with law. We il...

Gathering knowledge on the breeding ecology of species in wild-living conditions is critical to set baselines from which to analyse population trends and design appropriate conservation actions. This is particularly challenging when studying elusive animals like carnivores, as breeding events are difficult to detect and monitor. Based on direct sig...

COVID-19 lockdowns in early 2020 reduced human mobility, providing an opportunity to disentangle its effects on animals from those of landscape modifications. Using GPS data, we compared movements and road avoidance of 2300 terrestrial mammals (43 species) during the lockdowns to the same period in 2019. Individual responses were variable with no c...

We present information on the minimum average number of wolves per pack in late summer derived from fieldwork activities during the last three decades in north-western Spain, and on the mean minimum number of wolves travelling together in winter in the Cantabrian Mountains. The minimum average litter size observed between August and October (when t...

During 2021 and 2022 we collared three Iberian wolves (PL01, PL02, and PL03, resident wolves) in Tierra de Campos, an agricultural human-dominated landscape in NW Spain, to assess the use of passages across the Palencia-León High-Speed Railway. The wolves belonged to two adjacent wolf packs. Wolf home ranges were traversed by the High-Speed Railway...

Previous studies based on genetic identification of Himalayan wolves using non-invasive fecal samples established that Himalayan wolves range between 4,000 and 6,000 m.a.s.l. Here, we used a dataset of 106 photographs/images of Himalayan wolves obtained in Upper Humla, north-western Nepal, in 2021, where 52 camera traps were deployed during a total...

Wolf populations are recovering and expanding across Europe, causing conflicts with livestock owners. Here we compiled incident-based livestock damage data across 21 countries for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020, during which 39,262 wolf-caused incidents were reported from 470 administrative regions. We found substantial regional variation in all asp...

Biotic interactions are expected to influence species' responses to climate change, but they are usually not included when predicting future range shifts. We assessed the importance of biotic interactions to understand future consequences of climate and land use change for biodiversity using as a model system the brown bear (Ursus arctos) in Europe...

Introduction: Worldwide, expanding human activities continue to be a threat to many large-bodied species, including jaguars. As these activities continue, it is critical to understand how home range sizes will be impacted by human-modified landscapes. Objective: To evaluate the importance of protected and unprotected land on home-range size across...

Introduction: Worldwide, expanding human activities continue to be a threat to many large-bodied species, including jaguars. As these activities continue, it is critical to understand how home range sizes will be impacted by human-modified landscapes. Objective: To evaluate the importance of protected and unprotected land on home-range size across...

Appendix A and Supplementary Tables from article "Agriculture intensity and landscape configuration influence the spatial use of wildcats across Europe"

Land use intensification is increasing worldwide and affects wildlife movements, particularly of specialist carnivores. Resource availability and anthropogenic activities drive the extent and shape of home range size. Wildlife may respond to decreased resource availability under intensification scenarios by increasing their home ranges; however the...

We used automatic sound recorders to study spontaneous vocalizations of wild wolves during the pup-rearing season around rendezvous sites from 24 wolf packs in six study areas across North America, Asia, and Europe. Between 2018 and 2021, for a total of 1225 pack-days, we recorded 605 spontaneous wolf chorus howls and 224 solo-howl series. Howling...

From an anthropological perspective, the wolf (Canis lupus) is considered an animal with multiple symbolic meanings. Every social sector uses particular symbolic meanings to express contrasting viewpoints, concerns and claims related to wolves and sharing the landscape with this species. Although distinctive particularities may exist in each specif...

Deliberate wildlife poisoning with pesticides is widely reported worldwide, regardless of whether the toxic compound is authorized, of restricted use, or banned. Due to their high toxicity, Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs) are of special concern in this regard, with international calls claiming for concerted action to effectively address their se...

Appendix S1 to S9 from article "Presence of pastoral fields in mountain landscapes influences prey consumption by European wildcats"

Traditional agro‐pastoral practices are more beneficial for biodiversity than intensified agricultural systems. Promotion of the growth of natural herbaceous vegetation in pastoral fields can enhance rodent populations and consequently influence ecological aspects of carnivores with rodent‐based diets, like prey consumption in the European wildcat...

Brown bears (Ursus arctos) usually mate in spring throughout their global range, although a few cases of breeding activity are known in late summer and autumn. In this note, we describe four observations of courtship and copulations of brown bears in the wild in late August and September 2011, 2019, and 2021 in the Cantabrian Mountains (northwester...

Abstract The conservation of the vulnerable Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus) in Pakistan is challenged by retaliatory killing, driven by negative interactions between people and bears, such as livestock depredation. We distributed a questionnaire among 369 individuals in rural communities within the Mansehra District, Pakistan, where bear reta...

Coexistence between humans and large carnivores is mediated by diverse values and interactions. We focus on four sites in the Cantabrian Mountains of Spain with a history of continuous wolf presence to examine how perceptions of coexistence vary across contexts. We conducted semi-structured and informal interviews with livestock farmers (n = 271),...

Advances in the field of museomics have promoted a high sampling demand for natural history collections (NHCs), eventually resulting in damage to invaluable resources to understand historical biodiversity. It is thus essential to achieve a consensus about which historical tissues present the best sources of DNA. In this study, we evaluated the perf...

Illegal wildlife poisoning is a global threat for biodiversity, yet the magnitude of its impact on ecosystems is largely underestimated as most of poisoning episodes remain undetected. Here, we conducted a large-scale field experiment to better understand the real dimension of the illegal wildlife poisoning in terms of composition and number of spe...

Historical information is useful to set conservation baselines and, in turn, to inform the legal status of species and habitats. The conservation value of historic data has been acknowledged in international and national conservation laws, such as in the case of the implementation of the European Habitats Directive of 1992, and the guiding criteria...

Wolf populations are recovering and expanding across Europe, causing conflicts with livestock owners. To mitigate these conflicts and reduce livestock damages, authorities spend considerable resources to compensate damages, support damage prevention measures, and manage wolf populations. However, the effectiveness of these measures remains largely...

Reducing CO2 emissions progressively moves up on national and international political agendas. Hopes for “carbon neutrality” heavily rely on renewable energies, especially wind and solar. However, actions against climate change are not at zero cost and can exert large negative environmental and social impacts. The land footprints of wind, solar and...

Enforcement is critical to guarantee the effectiveness of environmental laws for nature conservation. Erroneously assuming an equivalence between the formal implementation of environmental legislation on paper and its practical enforcement in reality can result in biased conclusions with potential to ill-inform conservation actions and influence st...

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) persists in a variety of human-dominated landscapes and is subjected to various legal management regimes throughout Europe. Our aim was to assess the effects of intrinsic and methodological determinants on the hair cortisol concentration (HCC) of wolves from four European populations under different legal management. We...

Given the complex and dynamic interrelationships of the underlying factors contributing to conflicts associated with wolf presence and persistence in human‐dominated landscapes, it is often difficult to clearly identify the ultimate causes of these conflicts. In this study, a system dynamics modeling approach was adopted to simulate human–wolf conf...

Large carnivores are challenging to conserve because people are ambivalent. This research analyzed the social perception of wolves and brown bears from a novel psychological approach rarely used within conservation: animal species stereotypes (category-based generalizations). Spanish college students ascribed 17 characteristics to wolves (Study 1,...

Landscapes are mosaics of habitat associated with different risks and resources, including human activities, which can affect individual survival in wildlife. Different relationships between habitat characteristics and human‐caused and natural mortality can result in attractive sinks. We used individual‐based data from 97 Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx mo...

During 2017, we studied knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes towards brown bears by extensive mountain sheep farmers in the Western Pyrenees, using a structured questionnaire, specifically, whether the scarce bear presence, or the administrative region, was influential. Livestock raising practices are mainly family properties and have suffered a s...

In bears, reproduction is dependent on the body reserves accumulated during hyperphagia. The Cantabrian brown bear mainly feeds on nuts during the hyperphagia period. Understanding how landscape heterogeneity and vegetation productivity in human-dominated landscapes influence the feeding habits of bears may therefore be important for disentangling...

Wolf populations are recovering across Europe and readily recolonize most areas where humans allow their presence. Reintegrating wolves in human-dominated landscapes is a major challenge, particularly in places where memories and experience of coexistence have been lost. Despite the observed expansion trends, little has been done to prepare communi...

In some regions of the world, large carnivores, such as wolves, persist in landscapes with dense networks of paved roads. However, beyond the general impacts of roads on wildlife, we still lack information on carnivore responses to different types of roads and traffic volume levels. Using wolves in NW Spain as a case study, we show how wolves respo...

Governments around the world invest considerable resources to reduce damages caused by large carnivores on human property. To use these investments more efficiently and effectively, we need to understand which interventions successfully prevent such damages and which do not. In the European Union, the LIFE program represents by far the largest fina...

• Interspecific competition is an important evolutionary force, influencing interactions between species and shaping the composition of biological communities. In mammalian carnivores, to reduce the risks of negative encounters between competitors, species can employ a strategy of temporal partitioning, adapting activity patterns to limit synchrono...

Conservation regulations are instrumental for effective nature preservation, but several compliance and implementation failures jeopardize the achievement of their objectives, with strong potential to erode their legitimacy. Understanding how such deficits impact on stakeholders' perceptions is a matter of concern in pursuing truly effective tools....

Governments around the world invest considerable resources to reduce damages caused by large carnivores on human property. To use these investments more efficiently and effectively, we need to understand which interventions successfully prevent such damages and which do not. In the European Union, the LIFE program represents by far the largest fina...

The next reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the period 2021- 2027 (currently extended to 2023-2030) requires the approval by the European Commission of a Strategic Plan with environmental objectives for each Member State. Here we use the best available scientific evidence on the relationships between agricultural practices and bi...

This chapter describes the methodological bases used and presents novel economic information we have gathered in order to quantify the direct contribution that brown bears have on local economies and also to measure the current economic and occupational dependence of this resource on different activities and businesses. In contrast to previous stud...

Este capítulo describe las bases metodológicas y recoge información económica novedosa que permite cuantificar la contribución directa del oso pardo a las economías locales, y mide la dependencia económica y laboral que distintas actividades y negocios tienen de este recurso en la actualidad. A diferencia de estudios precedentes, hemos abordado la...

Little is known about the heritable behavioural traits of attacks by large carnivores on people. During the last  years attacks by brown bears Ursus arctos on people in the Cantabrian Mountains of Spain have been disproportionately concentrated in the eastern subpopulation. Excluding factors such as the existence of a single unusually bold bear,...

Sexually selected infanticides (SSI) committed by male bears during the mating season has attracted a great research attention, although this type of behavior has been rarely observed in the wild. Here, we document a bear infanticide attempt in the Cantabrian Mountains in which the male killed the adult female during the fight and, subsequently, co...

El escenario actual de cambio climático puede ocasionar diferentes impactos sobre las especies, desde sus genes hasta su fisiología y comportamiento, pasando por las interacciones entre ellas. A consecuencia del calentamiento global, la literatura científica sugiere que los osos pardos serán más activos durante el invierno, pasando menos tiempo hib...

The current climate change scenario may produce different impacts on species, ranging from on their genes to their physiology and behaviour, and for all possible interactions between all these. As a result of global warming, the scientific literature suggests that the brown bear will be more active during the winter (spending less time hibernating)...

We evaluated local communities’ fear of wolves in a scenario of wolf attacks on people and livestock in Western Iran. In particular, we investigated the interaction between experiences of wolf attacks (both on people and livestock) and three factors: behavioral action (management action, e.g., livestock carcass management), religious (e.g., the bel...