Trends of ungulate species in Europe: not all stories are equal

Jacopo Cerri, Roberta Chirichella, Walter Arnold, Luděk Bartoš, Tomasz Borowik, Juan Carranza, Francesco Chianucci, Sándor Csányi, Göran Ericsson, Marco Heurich, Ilpo Kojola, Atle Mysterud, Boštján Pokorny, Krzysztof Schmidt, Nikica Šprem, Joaquín Vicente, Ajša Alagić, Linas Balčiauskas, Jim Casaer, Sandra Cellina, Gundega Done, Carlos Fonseca, Dragan Gačić, Slavomír Find'o, Dime Melovski, Jānis Ozoliņš, Haritakis Papaioannou, Tiit Randveer, Vesa Ruusila, Christine Saint-Andrieux, Rauno Veeroja, Marco Apollonio

Wild ungulates have deep impacts on socio-ecological systems, and analyzing large-scale population trends in a multispecies set can identify their environmental and socio-economic drivers.
We collected annual hunting bags (n = 11,046, period 1975-2018) of 7 wild ungulates of high management interest across 25 European countries. We identified different temporal trends in hunting bags and for roe deer, red deer, wild boar, fallow deer, and mouflon, we also evaluated the social and environmental drivers of their abundances.
Number of harvested red deer, fallow deer, and wild boar increased steadily across Europe, with minor differences among countries, despite variations in land use and climate. On the contrary, roe deer harvest has decreased in six European countries since the late 1990s, probably due to reduced ecotone areas and locally also due to predation, intraspecific competition, and/or climate severity. Northern chamois harvests in Austria and Switzerland have decreased markedly, probably due to increasing temperatures, which decrease the survival of kids at high altitudes. Wild boar harvests have decreased in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania since the African Swine Fever outbreak in 2013-2014. Minor differences emerged between countries adopting different management regimes for wild ungulates.
While many studies pointed out landscape changes as the cornerstone for the increase in wild ungulates across Europe, our research emphasizes important species-specific differences. There is a need to predict how landscape and climate change and the growing presence of large carnivores, will affect populations of species already showing signs of decline, like European roe deer and northern chamois.