The prohibition of recreational hunting of wild ungulates in Spanish National Parks: Challenges and opportunities.

A new regulation has led to the prohibition of recreational hunting on estates located within Spanish National Parks (NPs). Before the ban, eleven NPs in Spain had already reported negative ecological consequences associated with high densities of wild ungulates. The new situation that has occurred after the ban signifies that policies with which to control populations of wild ungulates in NPs, most of which do not have a sufficient natural capacity to regulate populations, depend exclusively on the parks' authorities. The banning of recreational hunting implies a series of social, ecological, economic and logistic challenges. The control of wild ungulate populations in NPs requires: i) the legal basis for culling; ii) social acceptance as regards removing animals and the extractive procedures employed in NPs; iii) the long-term monitoring of wild ungulates and the damages that they cause, and iv) sufficient financial and human resources. A more integrated management and policy plan is, therefore, required, which should be supported by two pillars: i) the sustainability of natural resources and the conservation of functional environments, and ii) providing society with explanations regarding the need to manage wild ungulates. In order to bridge the potential gap between these key pillars, it is important to involve stakeholders in the decision-making processes concerning wild ungulate management. The forthcoming changes in Spanish NPs provide a promising opportunity to make a substantial improvement to wild ungulate management in these protected areas. This management approach could, moreover, serve as an example and be transferred to other protected spaces.

popharvest: An R package to assess the sustainability of harvesting regimes of bird populations.

Bird harvest for recreational purposes or as a source for food is an important activity worldwide. Assessing or mitigating the impact of these additional sources of mortality on bird populations is therefore crucial issue. The sustainability of harvest levels is however rarely documented, because knowledge of their population dynamics remains rudimentary for many bird species. Some helpful approaches using limited demographic data can be used to provide initial assessment of the sustainable use of harvested bird populations, and help adjusting harvest levels accordingly. The Demographic Invariant Method (DIM) is used to detect overharvesting. In complement, the Potential Take Level (PTL) approach may allow setting a level of take with regard to management objectives and/or to assess whether current harvest levels meet these objectives. Here, we present the R package popharvest that implements these two approaches in a simple and straightforward way. The package provides users with a set of flexible functions whose arguments can be adapted to existing knowledge about population dynamics. Also, popharvest enables users to test scenarios or propagate uncertainty in demographic parameters to the assessment of sustainability through easily programming Monte Carlo simulations. The simplicity of the package makes it a useful toolbox for wildlife managers or policymakers. This paper provides them with backgrounds about the DIM and PTL approaches and illustrates the use of popharvest's functionalities in this context.