| Summary: | Abstract Regular assessments of species’ status are an essential component of conservation planning and adaptive management. They allow the progress of past or ongoing conservation actions to be evaluated and can be used to redirect and prioritize future conservation actions. Most countries perform periodic assessments for their own national adaptive management procedures or national red lists. Furthermore, the countries of the European Union have to report on the status of all species listed on the directives of the Habitats Directive every 6 years as part of their obligations under Article 17. However, these national level assessments are often made using non-standardized procedures and do not always adequately reflect the biological units (i.e., the populations) which are needed for ecologically meaningful assessments. Since the early 2000’s the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe (a Specialist Group of the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission) has been coordinating periodic surveys of the status of large carnivores across Europe (e.g., von Arx et al. 2004; Salvatori & Linnell 2005, Kaczensky et al. 2013). These have covered the Eurasian lynx ( Lynx lynx ), the wolf ( Canis lupus ), the brown bear ( Ursus arctos ) and the wolverine ( Gulo gulo ). The golden jackal ( Canis aureus ) has been added to the LCIE prerogatives in 2014. The species is rapidly expanding in Europe (Trouwborst et al. 2015; Männil & Ranc 2022), a large-scale phenomenon that resembles that of the other large carnivores. Golden jackals are thriving in human-dominated landscapes (Ćirović et al. 2016; Lanszki et al. 2018; Fenton et al. 2021), where they are often functioning as the top predators, despite having smaller body size that is typical for large carnivores. The expansion of the species triggers many questions among scientists, stakeholders, and policy makers (Trouwborst et al. 2015; Hatlauf et al. 2021), that are closely connected to those raised by the other large carnivores (e.g., potential conflicts with livestock or ...
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