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Aim: The increasing availability of animal tracking datasets collected across many sites provides new opportunities to move beyond local assessments to enable detailed and consistent habitat mapping at biogeographical scales. However, integrating wildlife datasets across large areas and study sites is challenging, as species' varying responses to different environmental contexts must be reconciled. Here, we compare approaches for large‐area habitat mapping and assess available habitat for a recolonizing large carnivore, the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx). Location: Europe. Methods: We use a continental‐scale animal tracking database (450 individuals from 14 study sites) to systematically assess modelling approaches, comparing (1) global strategies that pool all data for training versus building local, site‐specific models and combining them, (2) different approaches for incorporating regional variation in habitat selection and (3) different modelling algorithms, testing nonlinear mixed effects models as well as machine‐learning algorithms. Results: Testing models on training sites and simulating model transfers, global and local modelling strategies achieved overall similar predictive performance. Model performance was the highest using flexible machine‐learning algorithms and when incorporating variation in habitat selection as a function of environmental variation. Our best‐performing model used a weighted combination of local, site‐specific habitat models. Our habitat maps identified large areas of suitable, but currently unoccupied lynx habitat, with many of the most suitable unoccupied areas located in regions that could foster connectivity between currently isolated populations. Main Conclusions: We demonstrate that global and local modelling strategies can achieve robust habitat models at the continental scale and that considering regional variation in habitat selection improves broad‐scale habitat mapping. More generally, we highlight the promise of large wildlife tracking databases for large‐area habitat mapping. Our maps provide the first high‐resolution, yet continental assessment of lynx habitat across Europe, providing a consistent basis for conservation planning for restoring the species within its former range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental problem of sustainability is how to reduce the double complexity of ecological and social systems into simple operational terms. We highlight that the conservation concept of focal species (selected species sensitive to a set of anthropogenic threats to their habitat) links multiple issues of ecological sustainability, and their habitat models can provide a practical tool for solving these issues. A review of the literature shows that most spatial modeling of focal species focuses on vertebrates, lacks the aspect of aquatic and soil habitats, and has been slow in the uptake by actual management planning. We elaborate on a deductive modeling approach that first generalizes the main influential dimensions of habitat change (threats), which are then parameterized as habitat quality estimates for focal species. If built on theoretical understanding and properly scaled, the maps produced with such models can cost-effectively describe the dynamics of ecological qualities across forest landscapes, help set conservation priorities, and reflect on management plans and practices. The models also serve as ecological hypotheses on biodiversity and landscape function. We illustrate this approach based on recent additions to the forest reserve network in Estonia, which addressed the insufficient protection of productive forest types. For this purpose, mostly former production forests that may require restoration were set aside. We distinguished seven major habitat dimensions and their representative taxa in these forests and depicted each dimension as a practical stand-scale decision tree of habitat quality. The model outcomes implied that popular stand-structural targets of active forest restoration would recover passively in reasonable time in these areas, while a critically degraded condition (loss of old trees of characteristic species) required management beyond reserve borders. Another hidden issue revealed was that only a few stands of consistently low habitat quality concentrated in the landscape to allow cost-efficient restoration planning. We conclude that useful habitat models for sustainable forest management have to balance single-species realism with stakeholder expectations of meaningful targets and scales. Addressing such social aspects through the focal species concept could accelerate the adoption of biodiversity distribution modeling in forestry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Habitat selection is a multi-scale process driven by trade-offs between benefits, such as resource abundance, and disadvantages, such as the avoidance of risk. The latter includes human disturbances, to which large carnivores, with their large spatial requirements, are especially sensitive. We investigated the ecological processes underlying multi-scale habitat selection of a large carnivore, namely Eurasian lynx, across European landscapes characterized by different levels of human modification. Using a unique dataset of 125 lynx from 9 study sites across Europe, we compared used and available locations within landscape and home-range scales using a novel Mixed Effect randomForest approach, while considering environmental predictors as proxies for human disturbances and environmental resources. At the landscape scale, lynx avoided roads and human settlements, while at the home-range scale natural landscape features associated with shelter and prey abundance were more important. The results showed sex was of relatively low variable importance for lynx's general habitat selection behaviour. We found increasingly homogeneous responses across study sites with finer selection scales, suggesting that study site differences determined coarse selection, while utilization of resources at the finer selection scale was broadly universal. Thereby describing lynx's requirement, if not preference, for heterogeneous forests and shelter from human disturbances and implying that regional differences in coarse-scale selection are driven by availability rather than preference. These results provide crucial information for conserving this species in human-dominated landscapes, as well as for the first time, to our knowledge, generalising habitat selection behaviour of a large carnivore species at a continental scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]