Research Overview & Articles

ARTICLE #1: Ecological Advantages of Grey Wolf (Canis lupus) Reintroductions and Recolonizations in North America

Citation: Villeneuve, Kimberly A., and Gilbert Proulx. "Ecological advantages of grey wolf (Canis lupus) reintroductions and recolonizations in North America." Wildlife conservation and management in the 21st century—Issues, solutions, and new concepts. Alpha Wildlife Publications, Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada (2024): 181-195

LINK: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379505975_Ecological_Advantages_of_Grey_Wolf_Canis_lupus_Reintroductions_and_Recolonizations_in_North_America

This article I found using Google Scholar. It was very easy - all I did was navigate to the Google Scholar website, typed in the word “wolves”, and this article was among those that popped up. Citing it, however, was more challenging and I had to search for the article separately in order to find the original website where it came from, which provided me with the citation that I used above.

The research study is actually a chapter in a book that was recently published, and discusses how allowing grey wolves (Canis lupus) to establish themselves and grow their populations can actually have many benefits to ecosystems that sometimes outweigh any harms they might inflict. Unfortunately, many people who work in wildlife conservation (*COUGH COUGH* Doug Smith) along with the general public are not aware of these advantages and believe that wolf reintroductions constitute a threat to livestock, pets and other organisms.

I do believe that this would make a good scicomm article, because the language is clear and easy for me to understand, plus the topic is interesting. I would make the wolves the protagonist of the article.

Article #2: Testing a conservation compromise: No evidence that public wolf hunting in Slovakia reduced livestock losses.

Citation: Kutal, Miroslav, et al. “Testing a Conservation Compromise: No Evidence That Public Wolf Hunting in Slovakia Reduced Livestock Losses.” Conservation Letters, vol. 17, no. 1, Jan. 2024, pp. 1–8. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12994.

LINK: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspxdirect=true&db=a9h&AN=175567416&site=ehost-live

I found this article through Academic Search Complete by searching Google for “Academic Search Complete”, clicking on the second link option that came up, and then simply searching “wolves” into the database. The process took very little time, maybe five to ten minutes.

The title of this article does pretty good job of summarising the main findings - essentially, the researchers either recorded or estimated data on the number of wolves, number/types of livestock, wolves killed, and livestock killed by wolves (among many other things) in 54 different districts of Slovakia, and then ultimately discovered that “livestock losses in a given year did not correlate with the number of wolves hunted” during the last hunting season. This suggests that the so-called lethal interventions cannot be justified as an effective way to control or maintain livestock populations.

I feel that this would make a good scicomm article, considering that the focus and results of the study are clear and easy for me to understand, and I think it would be easy for others to make sense of as well. Here, I would make the research itself the protagonist since it does seem like it challenges a lot of people’s beliefs and could lead to a change in how the public - and many researchers - perceive the topic of wolf management and intervention methods.