Research

The wildlife-ecological spatial planning in Carinthia is meant to balance the various interests and needs of stakeholder within an integral wildlife and habitat management concept. It aims at preserving sustainable wildlife populations wihtin a human dominated landscape. As such, it informs landscape planning by defining wildlife zones and management concepts based on these zones accordingly. As adaptive management concept, the wildlife-ecological spatial planning should be evaluated and updated regularly, to include new scientific results and adapt the spatial planning to new practical challenges. Within the current period, a special focus will be laid on implementing wildlife corridors and protected areas to enable large-scale connectivity and hence improve longterm viability of native wildlife populations.

The aim of this project is to investigate the usage of crossing structures by humans and ungulates. The crossing structures (over- & underpasses) are located in Sweden and were surveyed with camera traps by the swedish transport administration TRAFIKVERKET in the TRIEKOL project. The research project "TRIEKOL BOKU - Usage of crossing structures by humans and ungulates" at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences is a cooperative project with the University of of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden. The project is focussed on investigating the temporal seperation of the usage and possible disturbance effects by humans on the ungulate's usage of the structures.

Findings to date on the roe deer project in Greith suggest that interindividual differences in space use play a major role. Some bucks and does tolerated their neighbors in the now partly shared territorial sections, others avoided their same-sex conspecifics regardless of density. Deer in Greith apparently coped very well with smaller territories due to unlimited resources. A further increase in density should be avoided because of the then expected higher risk of disease transmission. We assume that the territory sizes will not go down even further, but that the overlaps will increase, in which those individuals are favored that do not use their resources primarily for defending the territories, but put them into attracting mating partners and reproduction. Younger bucks show more flexibility in their use of space, possibly because they have to (old bucks defend their territories) or because they already forgo the costly defense of a territory. Therefore, we hypothesize the following for the future: - With continued high density and unlimited food resources, territories will remain small and overlap will increase. - As a consequence, territories will only be detectable in winter (around feeding times) and in early summer (when fawns are born). - In the long term, the deer in the Greith research gate will give up their territoriality in favor of a more resource-efficient space utilization behavior and will organize their foraging areas flexibly in the habitat and over the seasons. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)