A guidance on how to start up a national wildlife population monitoring program harmonizable at European level

• DOI: 10.2903/sp.efsa.2023.en-8218
• Publication Date: 2023-08-04T06:21:26Z
• Authors: Pelayo Acevedo; Marco Apollonio; José Antonio Blan...; Jim Casaer; Javier Fernández‐...; Ezio Ferroglio; Patrick Jansen; Oliver Keuling; Yorick Liefting; Massimo Scandura; Graham C. Smith; Tomasz Podgorski; Stefania Zanet; Joaquín Vicente
• Keywords: Monitoring and evaluation

Wildlife policy makers and managers face challenges in taking decisions dealing with the complexity of international context, often operate without informed decision-making frameworks. This situation evidences need a harmonised Europe-wide wildlife monitoring framework able to sustain coordinated transboundary policy. With pragmatic approach, here we intend promote foundations transnational Europe, that is not meant replace but complement improve harmonisation existing plans. Here provide general on how start up national programs obtain comparable, aggregable results at European level. guidance mainly deals species are either abundant managed for hunting or prevent their impact whatever nature, or, rare protected, though associated human-wildlife conflict. In long term, rather than focusing one single type characteristic component, simultaneous multiple components (ecological including populational, epidemiological sociological) an appropriate strategy assess change deliver integral evidence underlying reasons observed changes (holistic approach). We finally raise basic proposal indicating main requirements set could be harmonisable level, which based progressive steps. The essential population distribution data collected first instance (i) statistics, (ii) density (relative abundance can used certain habitats) over observatory network, (iii) occurrence (presence/absence) data. There different ways integrating into system. If frame shared, ad hoc questions answered management proactively developed, yielding reliable trends account factors disregard borders. advocate integrated platform collecting, managing, sharing across ensuring standardisation consistency by users while addressing confidentiality secure management.