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Abstract

Animal populations commonly show changes in individual behaviour and demography as they change in size and density. For wolves, this process is strongly affected by their territorial behaviour, making them defending exclusive areas (territories) towards conspecifics. This means that wolf distribution may be better defined by a presence-absence of territories rather than a continuously changing distribution of individuals. This territorial behaviour also has important consequences for the conservation and management of wolf populations because culling or other mortality of adult territorial individuals may result in complex spatial dynamics similar to a chess-board of areas successively changing between being vacant or occupied.The Scandinavian wolf population has been intensively monitored in terms of size and distribution of wolf territories since the early 1980’s. The monitoring has been based on extensive tracking and registration of scent-marking individuals on snow and later combined with DNA-analyses of non-invasive samples (scats, urine) collected during the monitoring season. This monitoring procedure has resulted in an almost complete pedigree of the wolf population, where the individual genetic profiles of reproducing individuals have been registered and linked to a specific geographic area (wolf territory) each year. This allowed a detailed analysis of dispersal distances and relatedness among breeding individuals in established wolf territories during 1999-2020. In addition, the identity of parents of non-breeding individuals that died during the study period was also determined, which allowed an analysis of the location of mortality in relation to their natal territory and to population demographic characteristics, such as population size and local density.The objective of this report was to answer four specific research questions formulated by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, by investigating data on population development combined with information at the individual level as received from the extensive wolf monitoring program in Scandinavia. First, we investigated the origin and natal dispersal of all territorial wolves in the population from 1999 to 2020. The second concerned how fast territories were re-occupied after being terminated by culling or due to other reasons, and what factors that may affect this. Third, we examined the probability of re-occupation of terminated territories by dispersing individuals from neighbouring versus non-neighbouring territories. Finally, we examined how wolf population size and density affected the proportion of young dispersing wolves to survive and establish a territory within the main wolf distribution area.During the study period we recorded territory establishment of 468 different wolf pairs of which 259 (56%) cases showed both partners to have a distant origin, 185 (39%) cases with one of the partners being local (widow/widower or offspring from the same territory), and 24 (5%) cases where both adults were locally recruited, i.e. with different forms of incestuous mating. It was more common for female offspring to take over the parental territory together with a new male (10%) as compared to a male offspring taking over together with a new female (3%). Excluding locally recruited territorial wolves (widow/widowers and offspring), average dispersal distance from natal territory to established new territory was 131 (10-553, min-max) km for males and 90 (6-424 min-max) km for females. Dispersal distances from the natal territory decreased with an increase in local density of breeding territories for both sexes, but the percentage of the total variation in individual dispersal distances explained by local density was low (

Keywords

wolves; territory; time to re-occupation; dispersal; culling; density; population size; establishment; mortality

Published in

Publisher: Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

SLU Authors

UKÄ Subject classification

Ecology
Zoology

Publication identifier

  • ISBN: 978-91-576-9953-4

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/117905