The Common misconceptions section of the EU Large Carnivores website provides a list of common questions which come up regarding the presence of large carnivores in Europe. Here we select one to present in the newsletter, but further questions and answers can be viewed online.

Common misconception: Large carnivores need wilderness areas to survive, large carnivores can be contained in protected areas

Wilderness in Europe is understood being areas “composed of native habitats and species, and large enough for the effective ecological functioning of natural processes. They are unmodified or only slightly modified and without intrusive or extractive human activity, settlements, infrastructure or visual disturbance.” There is often an assumption, based perhaps on the American idea of extensive national parks, that large carnivores need extensive wild areas to flourish. While it is clear that the recovery of large carnivores in Europe is linked to the increase of forest area and corresponding increase of prey species, large carnivores are not especially sensitive to human activities and can coexist with farming and forestry in a mixed landscape. While habitat does remain a limiting factor, it is not the most significant one.

On the other hand, large carnivores do need space. Because of their predatory habits, their conservation needs to be planned on very wide spatial scales which span many intra- and international administrative and jurisdictional borders. In general, even the country-scale is too small for large carnivores needs and cross-border management must be considered. Protected areas (PA) (the Natura 2000 network) adds considerably to the protection of large carnivore habitat; however, most of its sites are too small to support interconnected sub‐populations that could form a viable population. Considering population structure, suitable habitat and minimum patch size, only very few countries are able to support viable populations of these species within their PA system.

These results indicate that, even though PAs may contribute to the conservation of large carnivores, they are certainly not sufficient alone.