RT Journal Article
T1 Walking on the dark side: Anthropogenic factors limit suitable habitat for gray wolf (Canis lupus) in a large natural area covering Belarus and Ukraine
A1 Kudrenko, Svitlana
A1 Fenchuk, Viktar
A1 Vollering, Julien
A1 Zedrosser, Andreas
A1 Selva Fernández, Nuria
A1 Ostapowicz, Katarzyna
A1 Beasley, James C.
A1 Heurich, Marco
AB Due to successful conservation initiatives and legislations, the grey wolf (Canis lupus) is recolonisingits historic range in Europe. However, wolves have never been extirpated acrosslarge areas in Eastern Europe but are often constrained to remote and inaccessible places due tocenturies of persecution. This study aimed to identify the potentially suitable wolf habitats inPolesia, a massive cross-border lowland region extending over southern Belarus and northernUkraine, which are often neglected in large carnivore studies at the continental scale. We hypothesizedthat anthropogenic rather than environmental factors govern wolf habitat suitability.We used a dataset of 4191 GPS locations obtained from radio-collared wolves (n = 26) andconfirmed observations (n = 231) during 2014–2021 and applied maximum entropy method toestimate relative habitat suitability for wolves in Polesia. Artificial light at night (ALAN), proportionof cropland and tree cover were the most important factors affecting wolf habitat suitability.Road densities contributed poorly to predicting habitat suitability for wolves. Our modelspredicted a quarter of Polesia as suitable habitat and revealed priority areas connecting theimportant source populations in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone in the east and the Białowie˙ zaForest in the west and thus essential for long-term wolf conservation. Our results provide the bases for effective, long-term wolf monitoring and management programs in both Belarus andUkraine. However, national and transboundary wolf management in Polesia has been extremelychallenging since 2022 due to the ongoing war and subsequent habitat degradation in this part ofEurope.
PB Elsevier
SN 2351-9894 (electrónico)
YR 2023
FD 2023-07
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10272/22528
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10272/22528
LA eng
NO Kudrenko, S., Fenchuk, V., Vollering, J., Zedrosser, A., Selva, N., Ostapowicz, K., Beasley, J. C., & Heurich, M. (2023). Walking on the dark side: Anthropogenic factors limit suitable habitat for gray wolf (Canis lupus) in a large natural area covering Belarus and Ukraine. In Global Ecology and Conservation (Vol. 46, p. e02586). Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2023.e02586
NO We gratefully acknowledge financial and technical support by Frankfurt Zoological Society. This study was partly financed throughthe project “Polesia – Wilderness Without Borders”. This project is part of the Endangered Landscapes Programme and is funded byArcadia. For the purpose of Open Access, the authors have applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript(AAM) version arising from this submission. Contributions of JCB were partially supported by the US Department of Energy Office ofEnvironmental Management under Award Number DE-EM0005228 to the University of Georgia Research Foundation as well as theNational Geographic Society (Award Numbers NGS-#EC0629-13 and #9344-13). Additional support for aspects of the work conductedwithin the CEZ was provided by the Institute of Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety’s Exploratory Research Programme, and theNorwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority.We also thank the former Director of the PSRER, P.M. Kudan and other scientists at the PSRER for their valuable contributions tothis research, as well as T. Hinton, S. Webster, C. Love, M. Byrne, P. Schlichting, and S. Lance for their assistance in the field. We thankD. Shamovich and V. Dombrovski for helping with the field data collection, as well as A. Parres, C. Bautista, Y. Strus, A. Sahaidak, S.Kubrakov, S. Zhyla, K. Korepanova and E. Vendras for valuable comments and suggestions.
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 14 jul 2026