Defining ecological and socially suitable habitat for the reintroduction of an apex predator

Abstract

Reintroducing native carnivores risks creating conflict with people and consequently reducing support for coexistence and conservation efforts. Determining the interface between areas of ecological suitability and conflict risk can help enhance success of carnivore restoration, but this is often difficult because accurate data on risks and tolerance are lacking. Gray wolves ( Canis lupus ), a focus of reintroduction efforts in the US, require tolerance to persist in human-dominated landscapes but also catalyze societal-level conflicts throughout their global range. Via an unprecedented process to restore an apex predator, in November 2020, citizens in the state of Colorado, USA voted to reintroduce wolves to the state where they had been extirpated ~70 years prior. We leveraged voting records of over three million citizens to quantify and map an index of tolerance for wolves and combined it with spatially explicit data on livestock distributions and land ownership to create predictions of direct conflict risk between wolves and humans. Conflict risk was juxtaposed with estimates of wolf ecological suitability developed using seasonal prey densities along with environmental and anthropogenic features that influence wolf habitat use. Our social-ecological modeling approach predicted that ~56 % of the West Slope of Colorado contained ecologically suitable habitat and relatively low conflict risk. Our models also delineated possible conflict hotspots where ecological suitability and conflict risk converge, thus facilitating targeted proactive management. We demonstrate how voting patterns can provide unique, spatially explicit insight on tolerance that can be integrated with other information to help facilitate human-carnivore coexistence and carnivore restoration success.