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Relationships between wild ungulates density and crop damage in Hungary

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Abstract

Game damage to agriculture represents one of the most important and most frequent human–wildlife conflicts worldwide. In Hungary and in the other European countries, damage caused by wild boar (Sus scrofa) and red deer (Cervus elaphus) is the most significant. The volume of damage is correlated with the population density of the game species, however, not exclusively. Since the growing expansion of wild ungulates is a general tendency in Europe, increasing conflicts can be envisaged. The objective of our study was to assess the possible relationships between the amount of agricultural game damage and big game population density considering some other factors (e.g. habitat structure, sown area of cultivated plants) by analysing wildlife management and land-use statistics for the 19 counties of Hungary from 1997 to 2008. According to the results, crop damage positively correlated with the population density of red deer and wild boar, with the length of forest edge, and the proportion of the sown area of maize. According to the regression model, these factors could be accountable for 74.2 % of the total agricultural game damage.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to give a great thank you to Hungarian Central Statistical Office for data support. We also thank our colleague Katalin Mátrai for her useful advice and help in data processing and János Tőzsér for his help in statistical evaluation. The experiments carried out in this study comply with the current Hungarian laws. We thank three anonymous reviewers for useful comments and advices on previous version of the manuscript.

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  1. Institute for Wildlife Conservation, Szent István University, Páter Károly street 1, 2103, Gödöllő, Hungary

    Norbert Bleier, Róbert Lehoczki, Dóra Újváry, László Szemethy & Sándor Csányi

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  1. Norbert Bleier
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  2. Róbert Lehoczki
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Correspondence to Norbert Bleier.

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Communicated by: Magdalena Niedziałkowska

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Bleier, N., Lehoczki, R., Újváry, D. et al. Relationships between wild ungulates density and crop damage in Hungary. Acta Theriol 57, 351–359 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13364-012-0082-0

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