Stefania Volani, University of Trento

The recovery of large carnivore populations in Europe represents a major conservation success. However, human-wildlife interactions have increased in parallel, often resulting in negative outcomes for humans and wildlife. In particular, large carnivores, such as the brown bear (Ursus arctos), can cause substantial economic losses and broader societal concerns. Although structured damage-reporting systems enable spatial and temporal analyses of human-bear conflicts in some countries, comprehensive and standardized monitoring frameworks are not uniformly implemented across Europe. Within the TransWILD Biodiversa+ project, this study aims to develop a transferable model to identify high-risk areas of bear damage (livestock predation, beehive and crop damage) and to characterize the landscape and ecological features associated with their occurrence. We compare two case studies: i) the Autonomous Province of Trento in Italy, with a reintroduced bear population and a standardized damage-reporting system, and ii) the Central Balkan Biosphere Reserve in Bulgaria, with a natural bear population and a damage-reporting system that used various data collection procedures. Two independent datasets are analyzed by integrating categorized damage records with environmental variables. Presence-only modeling using MaxEnt is applied to explore environmental predictors associated with reported damage sites and to evaluate the model transferability across contexts with different levels of data completeness. Expected outcomes include a comparison of spatial features related to bear damage locations across different contexts and the development of a methodological framework to support data integration between regions. Our results can inform targeted prevention strategies and support efforts toward sustainable human-bear coexistence.