Oksana Grente, Thibault Saubusse, Olivier Gimenez, Eric Marboutin, Christophe Duchamp

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 factors.
We studied hotspots of wolf depredation on sheep in France from the beginning of wolf recolonisation in 1994, up to 2018. For each year, we used spatial statistical analyses to determine the general depredation spatial pattern, then to locate depredation hotspots. We quantified the discrepancies between the analyses accounting or not for livestock availability.
We showed that ignoring livestock availability led to flawed inference about the depredation pattern, and resulted in a substantial number of unidentified hotspots, generally encompassing pastoral surfaces with small sheep availability.
Our results indicated that some large hotspots persisted in space and time whereas the distribution of depredations elsewhere in the study area tended to randomness and produced sporadic hotspots.
Synthesis and applications. Our methodology provides reliable information for managers to grasp the depredation pattern, to allocate resources and to evaluate management efficiency. In areas where depredations significantly persist, investigation on vulnerability is recommended.