International projects: powerful tools to harmonize and improve the management of large carnivores

In Europe, large carnivore populations typically span national, state, and regional borders. This makes comprehensive and cooperative population management a challenge, despite this shared vision among many managers and researchers. Additionally, the historical differences in management approaches across countries furthers the obstacles to successful implementation of transboundary population-level management.The European Union’s LIFE Program supports efforts to improve transboundary conservation and management of wildlife. We offer preliminary results from an emerging project called LIFE DINALP BEAR that was supported by the EU and is designed to foster transboundary population management and conservation of brown bears. Initial cooperative efforts began during the proposal writing phase to the European Union’s LIFE Program and brought together brown bear experts from Austria, Croatia, Italy and Slovenia who had a history of working together. After the proposal was awarded in 2014, a series of workshop and strategic meetings were organized among partners over the next few years. The first strategic document that was produced by the partnership, Guidelines for Common Management of Brown Bear in the Alpine and Northern Dinaric Region, has support of the ministries of all four countries and is designed to be incorporated into national policy over time. A second document, Guidelines for Bear Intervention Groups, will standardize protocols for management teams to respond to bear damages and emergencies. And the third document, Protocol for Data Gathering, will help synergize important datasets on bear occurrence and distribution and will be housed in a common monitoring database. Moreover, during the process of development of the common management guidelines more countries approached and joined the team, working on the document. Guidelines were finished with the involvement of experts and decision-makers from all countries connected by the Alpine Convention and Bosnia and Herzegovina. This way (cooperation with B&H and Switzerland), the practice of common, population-level management of brown bear already outgrew the borders of the European Union.