The Effect of Forest Cover Changes on Wild Boar Damage to Grass Fields in the Western Carpathians

Abstract

Wild boar can root in farmland for food during times of scarcity, which can cause unpredictable and severe financial burdens to farmers. Although wider damage patterns may be attributed to boar abundance and density, there is a lack of consensus about the drivers of more localised patterns of damage. A factor that may be able to explain these differences is changes to local forest cover, which may influence the rooting attractiveness of certain fields for wild boar. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, numerous changes to forest ownership occurred after the fall of communism, which altered the composition of the countries’ respective forestry practices in the decades that followed. This research project therefore aims to investigate whether recent and/or past changes to local forest cover influence the presence and intensity of wild boar damage to grass fields in the Czech-Slovak border region of the Western Carpathian Mountains. Data was gathered using drone surveys of damaged and undamaged grass fields in the study region, which were mapped and analysed in ArcGIS Pro. Three generalised additive models were created in R to investigate whether changes to forest cover and other variables influence wild boar damage. Forests planted after 1985 were found to have a negative predictive influence on wild boar damage compared to those planted before 1985, while the proportion of human infrastructure and the proportion of current forest cover were found to have positive effects on damage predictions. A spatial analysis also revealed significant clustering of damaged and undamaged areas. The results of this research may be useful for wildlife management in the area, especially if combined with boar population data and modelling.