Abstract
Wild boar (Sus scrofa) population spread into urban and periurban areas has exacerbated conflicts with humans. There is a need for planned wild boar management strategies, and Population viability analysis (PVA) combined with perturbation analyses allow the assessment of the management effort of control methods. Our study aims to develop stochastic predictive models of the increasing wild boar population of the 80 km2 peri-urban Mediterranean area of Collserola Natural Park (CNP), located near Barcelona, Spain, as well as assessing specific management measures (including reduced food availability, selective harvest, and reduction in fertility). Population parameters were estimated from previously published census and hunting data provided by the CNP and the local hunting administration. The results revealed that under the current conditions the CNP wild boar population will continue to increase. The most efficient strategy to reduce wild boar abundance was a combination of reducing supplementary anthropogenic food resources and selective removal of juvenile (<1 year) and yearling (1–2 years) wild boar. These strategies will probably be also the most efficient ones in other oversupplemented increasing wild boar populations in similar situations, although specific studies will be needed to fine-tune the best management option for each context. PVA allows the prediction of future population trends and the assessment of the efficacy and efficiency of potential management strategies before implementing management measures.
Highlights
Our study area consisted of the 80 km2 Natura 2000 Collserola Natural Park (CNP) (41 ̊25’52’’N, 2 ̊4’45’’E), located in Barcelona, in north-eastern Spain, Wild boar are considered abundant in the province of Barcelona [14,27]
We evaluated three Hypothetical Population Threshold (HPT) values (3,000, 4,200 and 6,400), corresponding to three different situations depending on the availability of anthropogenic resources under the same management
We modeled the decrease of CNP HPT for wild boar through supplementary feeding reduction [9,10,17,50] from the current estimated HPT value of 3,000 to the target value of 1,500, assuming a minimum supplementary food availability for 500 wild boar over the environmental carrying capacity (1,000 wild boar, [12])
Summary
Wild boar (Sus scrofa) population numbers have increased and their distribution area has spread worldwide in the last decades, mainly due to artificial feeding, a reduction in predators. Wild boar management assessment was funded by the contracts 13/051 and 15/0174 to Jorge Ramon Lopez-Olvera between the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Municipality of Barcelona. Raquel CastilloContreras benefitted from a PhD grant (2016FI_B 00425) co-financed by Generalitat de Catalunya (Secretaria d’Universitats i Recerca, Departament d’Economia i Coneixement) and the European Social Fund (ESF). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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