Pelayo Acevedo

Pelayo Acevedo
Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos, IREC (CSIC-UCLM-JCCM) · Sanidad Animal y Biotecnología

PhD

About

359
Publications
111,336
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
8,630
Citations

Publications

Publications (359)
Article
1. The Iberian Peninsula is witnessing ever-faster environmental changes, and new challenges for wild ungulates are continuously emerging as they become more abundant and widespread. 2. We conducted a systematic review to analyse the knowledge on wild ungulates inhabiting the Iberian Peninsula. We used Web of Science and Scopus search engines, comp...
Article
Full-text available
Harvest data have the potential to be used as an abundance index due to its widespread availability and long‐term collection across large geographical areas. However, challenges such as the lack of hunting effort information, varying data resolutions and reporting biases hinder its direct use as an abundance proxy. Here, we present the game target‐...
Article
Full-text available
The European Observatory of Wildlife EOW, as part of the ENETWILD project, represents a collaborative network that has been operating since 2021 to develop and implement standardized protocols to obtain harmonized data on distribution and density of target mammal species. In so doing, the EOW aims at contributing to improving the quality of data th...
Article
Full-text available
In many Mediterranean ecosystems, animal tuberculosis (TB), caused by Mycobacterium bovis, an ecovar of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC), is maintained by multi-host communities. It is hypothesised that interspecies transmission is mainly indirect via shared contaminated environments. Therefore, identifying spatial areas where MTBC bacteri...
Preprint
Bagaza virus, a vector-borne flavivirus that causes significant mortality in wild bird species, emerged in Portugal in September 2021. This study used integrated wildlife monitoring to quantify its impact on a natural population of red-legged partridge (Alectoris rufa) in southern Portugal. We constructed a baseline model of population dynamics pri...
Article
Full-text available
By using the latest available data, we provide estimates of wild boar (Sus scrofa) distribution and abundance pre‐African Swine Fever (ASF) based on occurrence data in Europe. Secondly, as a basis for the calibration model output into densities, we used the predictions of relative abundance, and hunting yield‐based model (hunted individuals per km²...
Article
Full-text available
Interspecific interactions are highly relevant in the potential transmission of shared pathogens in multi‐host systems. In recent decades, several technologies have been developed to study pathogen transmission, such as proximity loggers, GPS tracking devices and/or camera traps. Despite the diversity of methods aimed at detecting contacts, the ana...
Preprint
Full-text available
Over the past few decades, wild boar populations have surged globally, including in Tunisia, creating challenges that necessitate understanding the factors influencing their abundance and trends. Herein, we analyzed hunting statistics (number of seen and hunted animals during the hunting events) from 2008 to 2022 to examine the spatial pattern of w...
Article
Full-text available
Ixodes ricinus is the most medically relevant tick species in Europe because it transmits the pathogens that cause Lyme borreliosis and tick-borne encephalitis. Northern Spain represents the southernmost margin of its main European range and has the highest rate of Lyme borreliosis hospitalisations in the country. Currently, the environmental deter...
Article
The myxoma virus species jump from European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) to Iberian hares (Lepus granatensis) has raised concerns. We assess the decline suffered by Iberian hare populations on the Iberian Peninsula and discuss the association between the effect of myxomatosis and the average abundance index, which we estimated by using hunting b...
Article
Full-text available
Camera traps have transformed the way we monitor wildlife and are now routinely used to address questions from a wide range of ecological and conservation aspects. Sampling design optimization and a better understanding of drivers determining the precision of detection rates (i.e. the number of detections per unit of effort) are important methodolo...
Article
We conducted a cross-sectional study in wild boar and extensively managed Iberian pig populations in a hotspot area of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) in Spain. We tested for antibodies against CCHFV by using 2 ELISAs in parallel. We assessed the presence of CCHFV RNA by means of reverse transcription quantitative PCR protocol, which...
Article
Abstract A new regulation has led to the prohibition of recreational hunting on estates located within Spanish National Parks (NPs). Before the ban, eleven NPs in Spain had already reported negative ecological consequences associated with high densities of wild ungulates. The new situation that has occurred after the ban signifies that policies wi...
Article
Full-text available
The human dimension of wildlife is increasingly addressed in socioecological studies on the growth of some wildlife populations in Europe, which frequently leads to conflicts, particularly when wild populations inhabit or reach humanized landscapes. In Europe, ungulates have been increasing in number and distribution, especially the wild boar (Sus...
Article
Full-text available
ABSTRACT. Social perception of ungulates and their management depends on both their abundance and the socioeconomic context. However, an approach that addresses this issue is currently unavailable. Our objective was to employ a survey in Spain (n = 440) to evaluate the knowledge and perceptions on the eight species of wild ungulates that inhabit th...
Article
Genetic exchanges between species provide valuable opportunities to dissect the relative importance of neutral and selective processes driving introgression events and to test their functional relevance. In the northern half of the Iberian Peninsula, the Iberian hare, Lepus granatensis, presents extensive patterns of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) intro...
Presentation
Camera traps are used to address questions from a wide range of ecological and conservation aspects. In this respect, sampling design optimization and a better understanding of drivers that determine detection rates are important methodological issues. Despite a wide range of factors that have already been explored, little attention has been played...
Article
Full-text available
In order to monitor wildlife populations in a manner that supports policy makers and natural resource managers, data must be collected using frameworks and methodologies that allow for comparisons between projects and across time. Though hunting statistics may represent a reliable data source for monitoring population trends in game species, a stan...
Article
Full-text available
Estimation of changes in abundances and densities is essential for the research, management, and conservation of animal populations. Recently, technological advances have facilitated the surveillance of animal populations through the adoption of passive sensors, such as camera traps (CT). Several methods, including the random encounter model (REM),...
Article
Full-text available
Context The expansion of exotic plantations can impose conservation challenges on wildlife, and the Iberian Peninsula has one of the widest planted areas of exotic Eucalyptus sp. in Europe. Since mesocarnivores are pivotal elements of ecosystems’ functioning and Eucalyptus have been modifying the Portuguese landscape context in the last half centur...
Article
Full-text available
The management of animal tuberculosis (TB) is a priority for European Union animal health authorities. However, and despite all the efforts made to date, a significant part of Spain has as yet been unable to obtain the officially tuberculosis-free (OTF) status. Information regarding wildlife disease status is usually scarce, signifying that the rol...
Article
Full-text available
The distribution range and population abundance of species provide fundamental information on the species–habitat relationship required for management and conservation. Abundance inherently provides more information about the ecology of species than do occurrence data. However, information on abundance is scarce for most species, mainly at large sp...
Article
Forest raptor nest-site selection is mostly influenced by the quality of the habitat, food resources, and competition. Here, we identified common targets of trees selected as breeding sites and differences in selection traits, i.e. prey availability and intra- and interspecific competition, among Booted Eagle, Long-legged Buzzard, Black Kite, and C...
Article
Full-text available
Wildlife policy makers and managers face challenges in taking decisions and dealing with the complexity of international context, and often operate without informed decision‐making frameworks. This situation evidences the need of a harmonised Europe‐wide wildlife monitoring framework able to sustain coordinated transboundary policy. With a pragmati...
Article
Motion‐sensitive cameras are popular as non‐invasive monitoring tools, and several methods have been developed to estimate population densities from camera data. These methods frequently rely on auxiliary movement data including the distance traveled by an individual in a day and the proportion of the day that an animal spends moving when individua...
Article
Habitat use is a virtually universal activity among animals and is highly relevant as regards designing wildlife management and conservation actions. This has led to the development of a great variety of methods to study it, of which resource selection functions combined with biologging-derived data (RSF) is the most widely used for this purpose. H...
Article
Full-text available
Over the past few decades, the use of camera-traps has revolutionized our ability to monitor populations of wild terrestrial mammals. While methods to estimate abundance from individually-identifiable animals are well-established, they are mostly restricted to species with clear natural markings or else necessitate invasive and often costly animal...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The European Observatory of Wildlife (EOW, https://wildlifeobservatory.org/) is an EFSA-funded (European Food and Safety Authority) initiative run by the ENETWILD project (www.enetwild.com). The EOW aims to improve harmonizing wildlife monitoring methods throughout the Europe and provide the possibilities to estimate the density of wildlife across...
Preprint
Estimation of changes in abundances and densities is essential for the research, management, and conservation of animal populations. Recently, technological advances have facilitated the surveillance of animal populations through the adoption of passive sensors, such as camera traps (CT). Several methods, including the random encounter model (REM),...
Article
The American mink Neogale vison is an invasive alien species in Europe that threatens endemic biodiversity and can transmit zoonotic diseases, including the SARS‐CoV‐2 virus. The last attempt to map the geographic range of this species in Europe, at continental scale, dates back to 2007. We aimed to update the distribution map of the feral American...
Article
Full-text available
Modelos de distribución de especies integrando diferentes fuentes de datos (software)
Presentation
Full-text available
Reliable estimates of species distribution and abundance are key elements for wildlife conservation and management. However, this basic information is not always easy to obtain due either to logistical constraints and/or intrinsic difficulties inherent to the studied species. Harvest data (the number of animals culled during a hunting season) are o...
Article
Full-text available
The European Observatory of Wildlife (EOW) as part of the ENETWILD project, aims to improve the European capacity for monitoring wildlife populations, implementing international standards for data collection, providing guidance on wildlife density estimation, and finally, to promote collaborative, open data networks to develop wildlife monitorin...
Preprint
Full-text available
The supplementary feeding of wild ungulates is a common and pervasive practice throughout Europe, but the understanding on its unintended ecological effects is still limited. This management action has different degrees of intensity from artificial grasslands to supplementation in feeders, since the type and criteria of each supplementary feeding p...
Article
Full-text available
The goal of this report is modelling the occurrence for carnivores at the European scale and to compare the output of occurrence with observed hunting yield (HY) density models for red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and badger (Meles meles). Random Forest function was used for modelling occurrence of species. Occurrences available from the past 30 years (1990...
Article
Full-text available
Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious chronic disease due to infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTC) bacteria. Monitoring of wildlife, especially potential reservoirs, is important for detecting changes in disease occurrence and assessing the impact of interventions. Here, we examined whether wild boar (Sus scrofa) may contribute to the...
Article
Body condition (BC), is a measure to assess the health status of domestic and wild animals. When food resources are abundant, a decrease in BC may indicate an increase in the energetic expenditure due to the effects of growth, reproduction, or disease. BC impoverishment is one of the most common clinical effects of diseases progressing chronically,...
Article
Full-text available
European wild rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) and red-legged partridge (Alectoris rufa) are main small game species of conservation concern in Mediterranean ecosystems. To date, their presence in wild boar’s (Sus scrofa) diet and factors driving their consumption have been little investigated. A genetic metabarcoding approach was used on 80 wild boa...
Article
Expanding on the foundation of Zeitschrift für Jagdwissenschaft in 1955, the European Journal of Wildlife Research (EJWR) continues to publish original research and reviews on all aspects of wildlife science regardless of the geographic region. Eighteen years after publication of the first issue of EJWR, we briefly reflect on the journal’s profile...
Article
Full-text available
The International Symposium on Wild Boar and Other Suids (IWBS 2022), which took place in Montseny Biosphere Reserve (Catalonia, Spain) in September 2022, provided to ENETWILD with the opportunity to meet in‐person for the first time after 2.5 years, and meet the international scientific community with expertise on wild suids and other ungulates. T...
Article
Full-text available
During summer 2022, the European Wildlife Observatory (EOW²), involving 50 study areas in at least 30 European countries, has applied similar camera‐trapping‐based population estimation protocols and data collection standards to facilitate harmonization and interoperability. For this purpose, continuous training of the network of wildlife professio...
Article
Full-text available
It is essential to provide tools to wildlife professionals and researchers in order to facilitate data collection on wildlife density estimation following standardized protocols in the field. This is relevant for efficient harmonized data management systems, from the field to final reporting. Our main objective was to facilitate the collection of i...
Article
Full-text available
Background To control the transmission of relevant shared diseases, such as animal tuberculosis (TB) and African swine fever (ASF), it is essential to reduce the risk of interaction between livestock and wild ungulates. In Eastern and Central Europe, the current spread of ASF virus affecting wild boar and domestic pigs (especially those raised outd...
Article
The Water Framework Directive (WFD) aims to attain ‘good quality’ status for all European water bodies through the achievement of good ecological status. To this purpose, the WFD advocates the creation of cost-effective monitoring tools to deliver appropriate data that help to create links between chemical and ecological indicators, as those from e...
Article
Multiple infections or co-exposure to pathogens should be considered systematically in wildlife to better understand the ecology and evolution of host-pathogen relationships, so as to better determine the potential use of multiple pathogens as indicators to guide health management. We describe the pattern of co-exposure to several pathogens (i.e. s...
Article
Full-text available
El mapache Procyon lotor (Linnaeus, 1758) es un mesocarnívoro originario del centro y norte de América que ha conseguido expandir su área de distribución enormemente gracias a introducciones y escapes de granjas y zoológicos. En España, tras las primeras observaciones realizadas a principios de siglo XXI como consecuencia de escapes de núcleos zool...
Article
Full-text available
The goal of this report is i) to model the occurrence and hunting yield (HY) density of wild ungulates not only for widely distributed species in Europe, but also for those ones which have a constrained distribution and ii) to compare the output of occurrence with observed HY. Random Forest function was used for modelling occurrence of species. We...
Presentation
La estima de densidades poblacionales es un parámetro fundamental para la toma de decisiones en el ámbito de la conservación y la gestión la fauna silvestre. En este sentido, el uso de fototrampeo como herramienta para monitorizar los tamaños poblacionales ha ido adquiriendo importancia en los últimos 20 años, dándose un gran desarrollo tecnológico...
Preprint
Full-text available
Wildlife population monitoring requires that collected information be comparable among data collection frameworks and useful in decision making. Hunting statistics may suppose a reliable alternative for monitoring population trends of game species, however, there is not a common and homogeneous framework in Europe, even, within countries. As a case...
Chapter
This comprehensive species-specific chapter covers all aspects of the mammalian biology, including paleontology, physiology, genetics, reproduction and development, ecology, habitat, diet, mortality, and behavior. The economic significance and management of mammals and future challenges for research and conservation are addressed as well. The chapt...
Article
Full-text available
In biogeography the competitive exclusion principle (CEP) has been confirmed in some cases but not in others. This has fueled an unresolved debate between those advocating niche theory or the neutral theory in biodiversity and biogeography. We suggest that this situation mainly arises from the use of crisp logic, where the CEP is defined as either...
Article
Full-text available
Native wild boar populations are expanding across Europe, causing concern due to their significant soil disturbances and considerable impact on ecosystems. However, little is known about how wild boar activities affect other organisms. This study investigated the effects of wild boars on the abundance of fungal sporocarps and their respective funga...
Presentation
Full-text available
Hunting statistics are commonly used to model wild boar abundance and distribution at large spatial scales. However, data availability is not always homogeneous, and hunting yields are often aggregated at different resolutions in different countries or territories. The main objective of this study was to produce wild boar abundance maps at a fine r...
Article
Full-text available
The main aims of this report are (i) to implement camera trap practical methods to estimate wild boar density by means of field trials, which is also of application to other medium and big sized mammals and (ii) to report on progress of the development of automatic identification for density estimation based on camera trapping. As for (i), we speci...
Article
Full-text available
Tick abundance is an essential demographic parameter to infer tick-borne pathogen transmission risks. Spatiotemporal patterns of tick abundance are heterogeneous, so its determinants at small spatial scales need to be understood to reduce their negative effects on hosts. Current knowledge of these determinants is scarce, especially in Mediterranean...
Article
Full-text available
The new‐born European Observatory of Wildlife (EOW)² is a part of the EFSA‐funded ENETWILD project, and has the aim of improving the European capacities for monitoring wildlife populations, implementing international standards for data collection, providing guidance on wildlife density estimation, and finally, to promote collaborative, open data ne...
Article
Full-text available
Human–wildlife conflicts are a growing problem in Northern Hemisphere where wild ungulates are one of the taxonomic groups most frequently involved. To mitigate these conflicts, it is essential to develop preventive actions able to avoid encounters between wildlife and human (activities). We here employed photo-trapping to evaluate the behaviour of...
Article
Full-text available
Population density estimates are important for wildlife conservation and management. Several camera trapping‐based methods for estimating densities have been developed, one of which, the random encounter model (REM), has been widely applied due to its practical advantages such as no need for species‐specific study design. Nevertheless, most of the...
Article
While reliable estimates of species abundance distribution are required for wildlife management and are greatly needed at broad spatial scales, such information is scarce. In this context, the usefulness of spatial modelling as a tool for predicting game species relative abundance and distribution from hunting yield data was studied. Hunting yield...
Article
Full-text available
One of the main objectives of ENETWILD consortium is to collect data on density, hunting statistics and wildlife occurrence in order to model the geographical distribution and abundance of wildlife species across Europe as a tool to support the assessment of risks associated, for example, with disease transmission. Created in the framework of the E...
Article
Full-text available
Biodiversity is dramatically declining worldwide due to the complex processes that include interactions among threats. Studies investigating how multiple drivers (inter)act to influence spatio-temporal shifts in species distribution ranges, which are among the most anticipated changes in biodiversity in the future, are still scarce in the scientifi...
Article
Full-text available
Reliable estimates of the distribution of species abundance are a key element in wildlife studies, but such information is usually difficult to obtain for large spatial or long temporal scales. Wildlife–vehicle collision (WVC) data is systematically registered in many countries and could be used as a proxy of population abundance if the number of W...
Article
Full-text available
Abstract This report presents the results of field activities in relation to the generation of reliable wild boar density values by camera trapping (CT) in 19 areas in Europe, mainly in East Europe. Random Encounter Model (REM) densities ranged from 0.35±0.24 to 15.25±2.41 (SE) individuals/km2. No statistical differences in density among bioregion...
Article
Full-text available
BACKGROUND Fences are one of the most widespread manmade features in nature, constituting an artificial limitation to the movement of wildlife. To date, their effects on wildlife behavior have been understudied but this knowledge is required to design effective management procedures. Using 21 GPS‐monitored wild boar, we evaluated the permeability o...