The wolf and the city: insights on wolves conservation in the anthropocene

After a long period of human persecution that led it to extinction in most of its distribution range, the wolf is undergoing a fast recovery. Despite being described as an elusive species only living in remote areas, wolves are recently occupying also human-dominated landscapes, increasing the frequency of direct contacts with humans. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether this situation is only caused by a numerical increase or partially facilitated by a higher tolerance of wolves with respect to human proximity. We focused on a European region offering an abundant, widespread and long-term monitored wolf population to analyse wolf pack distribution and its relationship with human presence across areas recolonized across four different time periods (1972, 1996, 2005 and 2016). Throughout areas recolonized during different periods, wolves were initially located in mountains and hills, occupying plains only in the recent past. Although they consistently tended to be located as far as possible from urban settlements, especially from those with over 5000 inhabitants, in 2016, 70% of packs included at least one urban settlement within the expected home range. Moreover, the distance kept by wolves from the nearest urban settlement was more constrained in areas of recent recolonization (2005 and 2016) and in the mountainous altitudinal range, likely due to a reduced availability of territories. We showed that wolves tend to keep as far away as possible from humans, but they can also permanently occupy human-dominated landscapes to cope with the lower availability of space induced by their remarkably successful recolonization. Our results shed light on an upcoming scenario for the conservation of large carnivores.