TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reinhardt, Ilka
A1  - Kluth, Gesa
A1  - Nowak, Carsten
A1  - Szentiks, Claudia Anita
A1  - Krone, Oliver
A1  - Ansorge, Hermann
A1  - Mueller, Thomas
T1  - Military training areas facilitate the recolonization of wolves
in Germany
T2  - Conservation letters
N2  - Wolves (Canis lupus) are currently showing a remarkable comeback in the highly frag-mented cultural landscapes of Germany. We here show that wolf numbers increasedexponentially between 2000 and 2015 with an annual increase of about 36%. Wedemonstrate that the first territories in each newly colonized region were establishedover long distances from the nearest known reproducing pack on active militarytraining areas (MTAs). We show that MTAs, rather than protected areas, served asstepping-stones for the recolonization of Germany facilitating subsequent spreadingof wolf territories in the surrounding landscape. We did not find any significant differ-ence between MTAs and protected areas with regard to habitat. One possible reasonfor the importance of MTAs may be their lower anthropogenic mortality rates com-pared to protected and other areas. To our knowledge, this is the first documented casewhere MTAs facilitate the recolonization of an endangered species across large areas.
KW  - Canis lupus
KW  - large carnivores
KW  - population growth
KW  - protected areas
KW  - recolonization
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/53546
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-535460
SN  - 1755-263X
N1  - © 2019 The Authors. Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
VL  - 12
IS  - 3, e12635
SP  - 1
EP  - 7
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken, NJ
ER  -