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The ENETWILD consortium implementedtheEFSA‐funded project "Wildlife: collecting and sharing data on wildlife populations, transmitting animal diseases agents",whose main objective is to collect wild boardensity, hunting and occurrence dataand model species geographical distribution and abundance throughout Europe.This subject is of particular concern due to the continued advance of African swine fever (ASF). In May 2019,the ENETWILD consortiumorganised aworkshop for 30game biologists, animal health professionals, and experts from national huntingand forest authorities from 14 countries form North East Europe.The overall objectives of the workshop were to present milestones and achievements of the ENETWILD project,review different country frameworks forwild boar data collection and harmonization (hunting, density and occurrence data), as well as to review scientificmethods for determiningwild boar abundance and density, and train oncamera trapping and the random encounter method (REM).It was agreed thatwild boar abundance and densityestimates available in NorthEastern Europe are unreliable because most of them are not based on scientific methods. Hence, there is a need to implement a novel method for determining wild boar abundance and densitythat uses hunting bag statistics including measures of hunting effort and efficiency during collective drive hunts, compared against density values calculated using camera trapping and the random encounter method (REM). Several collaboratorsfrom Poland, Finland, Belarus, Russia, Lithuania have declared their willingness to participate in such pilot studies, and all agreed in improving data collection, including by means of citizen science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hunting statistics can be suitable to determine wild boar density estimates if a calibration with an accepted rigorous method is performed. Here, densities calculated from drive counts during collective drive hunting activities are compared against density values calculated by camera trapping using the random encounter method. For this purpose, we selected 10 study sites in Spain, from North to South representing a diversity of habitats, management and hunting traditions without artificial feeding, plus one study site in Czech Republic where artificial feeding was practiced. Density values estimated from both drive counts and camera trapping were strongly positively correlated (R2=0.84 and 0.87 for linear and non‐linear models, respectively) and showed a good agreement. Drive counts data might be therefore used as a density estimate to calibrate models for estimating density in large areas and potentially, to compare densities among areas. For these purposes, there is still the need to harmonise hunting data collection across Europe to make them usable at a large scale. Our results need to be confirmed across a wider number of European populations to provide valid geographical wild boar density predictions across Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]