José Vicente López-Bao

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

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...

Traditional agro-pastoral practices are more beneficial for biodiversity than intensified agricultural systems. Promotion of 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 (Fel...

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

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...

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,...

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),...

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,...

Aim The recent recovery of large carnivores in Europe has been explained as resulting from a decrease in human persecution driven by widespread rural land abandonment, paralleled by forest cover increase and the consequent increase in availability of shelter and prey. We investigated whether land cover and human population density changes are relat...

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...

Felids and canids coexist along their ranges worldwide. Various interactions can occur between these carnivores, with multiple consequences such as demographic changes of competitors, or behavioural modifications in the use of the spatial, temporal or trophic niches. European wildcats (Felis silvestris silvestris) and red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) coex...

Under the scenario of population growth and range increase of the Cantabrian brown bear, the possibility of bear-human coexistence in the same territory, the compatibility of bears with certain activities, such as livestock farming, or the direct risk that bears pose to humans, are recurring questions in debates relating to its conservation and fut...

Monitoring of the brown bear population in the Cantabrian Mountains has been undertaken using annual counts of the number of female bears with cubs of the year. However, the increase in the bear population and its distribution range over the past 25 years make applying this technique ever less reliable, above all in the western subpopulation. Conse...

New conservation challenges are arising from the current demographic growth and territorial expansion experienced by brown bears in the Cantabrian Mountains, among which is the mitigation of the damage caused to human interests, such as livestock rearing and agriculture. In order to start quantifying the impact bears have in the region, we collated...

This chapter explores three aspects of conflictive brown bear behaviour in the Cantabrian Mountains. Firstly, we argue the reasons of why bears approach humanised areas, what constitutes habituation and what their causes and consequences are. Secondly, we present the problem of bears and human garbage. We revise the worldwide literature of the effe...

A standardised method has been used to monitor bear families in the Cantabrian Mountains since 1989. The quantity of information gathered over this time has been remarkable, with more than 4,500 observations of females with cubs between 1989 and 2018. This information has not only allowed us to confirm the recovery of the species in the Cantabrian...

This chapter addresses how the population recovery of the brown bear in the Cantabrian Mountains affects the consideration of its current state of conservation and its legal protection. In accordance with the criteria of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the population has gone from “Critically Endangered” to “Endangered”, and it will presum...

The European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) still fails to address the environmental and socioeconomic challenges of EU’s agriculture. Agricultural ecosystems are further degrading, biodiversity is declining and agricultural Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions remain high. At the same time, farms are facing unresolved socio-economic chall...

In a genetic study on brown bears (Ursus arctos) in the Cantabrian Mountains, Gregó rio et al. (2020) interpreted the asymmetrical gene flow they found from the eastern subpopula-tion towards the western one as an exodus of bears forced to flee from the eastern nucleus "with higher human disturbance and poaching", concluding that connectivity may b...

A participatory monitoring programme of an exceptional modification of urban soundscapes during Covid-19 containment.

Caching behavior consists on the relocation or storage of food to protect it from competitors, to delay food spoilage, or to exploit it during times of scarcity. While this behavior has been widely described for some medium and large-sized felids, only a few cases documented caching behavior in small felids. Here, we provide the first exhaustive de...

It has been suggested that conditioned food aversion (CFA) could be a potential non-lethal intervention by which to deter attacks on livestock by large carnivores. CFA occurs when an animal associates the characteristics of a food with an illness, thus rejecting that food in subsequent encounters. CFA can be associated with an artificial odour duri...

The world's large terrestrial mammalian carnivores and herbivores (henceforth, megafauna) has been severely impacted by humans worldwide. Although this impact across the globe is variable, there has been little information quantifying this impact on biodiversity. Here, we use a macroecological modeling approach to evaluate the impact of different h...

Reliability of population size and density estimates is one of the most contentious issues when evaluating the conservation status of species. Non-invasive DNA monitoring, combined with spatially explicit capture-recapture approaches (SCR), is recurrently presented as a reliable procedure to achieve accurate, precise and feasible estimates. However...

Decision-making about large carnivores is complex and controversial, and processes vary from deliberation and expert analysis to ballot boxes and courtrooms. Decision-makers range from neighboring landowners to the United Nations. Efficacy, longevity and legitimacy of policies may often depend as much on process as the policy itself. Overcoming con...

Among species, coexistence is driven partly by the partitioning of available resources. The mechanisms of coexistence and competition among species have been a central topic within community ecology, with particular focus on mammalian carnivore community research. However, despite growing concern regarding the impact of humans on the behaviour of s...

El uso ilegal del veneno es una de las principales amenazas para la conservación de especies, particularmente de carroñeros y depredadores. Aunque no existe información fiable sobre el impacto real del veneno en España, entre 1992 y 2013 se ha estimado que podrían haber muerto unos 185.000 animales entre aves y mamíferos. A pesar del elevado número...

Conservation conflicts are gaining importance in contemporary conservation scholarship such that conservation may have entered a conflict hype. We attempted to uncover and deconstruct the normative assumptions behind such studies by raising several questions: what are conservation conflicts, what justifies the attention they receive, do conservatio...

Illegal wildlife trade threatens iconic species, such as elephants, rhinos or giraffes, on which poaching pressure has increased in recent times. By poisoning the carcasses of poached megafauna to prevent the early detection of poachers, this illegal activity is contributing to push African vultures to the brink of extinction. But poisoning vulture...

Las interacciones entre humanos y osos están aumentando en España. El oso siempre ha estado cerca de la gente en la Cordillera Cantábrica y los Pirineos, pero en los últimos años las poblaciones se están recuperando y las actividades de naturaleza son cada vez más populares. Muchos rincones que hasta hace poco apenas eran hollados por humanos sopor...

Addressing the biodiversity crisis requires renewed collaborative approaches. Large carnivores are ambassador species, and as such they can aid the protection of a wide range of species, including evolutionarily distinct and threatened ones, while being popular for conservation marketing. However, conflicts between carnivores and people present a c...

Addressing the biodiversity crisis requires renewed collaborative approaches. Large carnivores are ambassador species, and as such they can aid the protection of a wide range of species, including evolutionarily distinct and threatened ones, while being popular for conservation marketing. However, conflicts between carnivores and people present a c...

Cánidos y félidos coexisten en gran parte de su rango de distribución. Sin embargo, se desconocen muchos aspectos de su interacción a nivel comportamental, dada la dificultad de realizar este tipo de observaciones. En la Cordillera Cantábrica (NO España), tanto zorros como gatos monteses hacen uso de los prados destinados al pastoreo y la siega com...

Leopard (Panthera pardus) predation on domestic animals is often associated with human-leopard conflict. We investigated leopard pre-dation patterns of domestic animals using a semi-structured questionnaire. We quantified domestic animal losses in randomly selected households (n = 62) and households with previously reported leopard predation (n = 3...

El objeto de este informe es recopilar información bibliográfica y de campo sobre las relaciones de los osos con las basuras. La finalidad última es conocer la magnitud del este problema en la Cordillera Cantábrica actualmente y plantear una serie de propuestas con la mayor información posible para anticiparnos a los conflictos, prevenirlos y conoc...