Large carnivores are currently disappearing from many world regions because of habitat loss, prey depletion, and persecution. Ensuring large carnivore persistence requires safeguarding and sometimes facilitating the expansion of their populations. Understanding which conservation strategies, such as reducing persecution or restoring prey, are most effective to help carnivores to reclaim their former ranges is therefore important. Here, we systematically explored such alternative strategies for the endangered Persian leopard (Panthera pardus saxicolor) in the Caucasus. We combined a rule-based habitat suitability map and a spatially explicit leopard population model to identify potential leopard subpopulations (i.e., breeding patches), and to test the effect of different levels of persecution reduction and prey restoration on leopard population viability across the entire Caucasus ecoregion and northern Iran (about 737,000 km²). We identified substantial areas of potentially suitable leopard habitat (~120,000 km²), most of which is currently unoccupied. Our model revealed that leopards could potentially recolonize these patches and increase to a population of >1,000 individuals in 100 yr, but only in scenarios of medium to high persecution reduction and prey restoration. Overall, reducing persecution had a more pronounced effect on leopard metapopulation viability than prey restoration: Without conservation strategies to reduce persecution, leopards went extinct from the Caucasus in all scenarios tested. Our study highlights the importance of persecution reduction in small populations, which should hence be prioritized when resources for conservation are limited. We show how individual-based, spatially explicit metapopulation models can help in quantifying the recolonization potential of large carnivores in unoccupied habitat, designing adequate conservation strategies to foster such recolonizations, and anticipating the long-term prospects of carnivore populations under alternative scenarios. Our study also outlines how data scarcity, which is typical for threatened range-expanding species, can be overcome with a rule-based habitat map. For Persian leopards, our projections clearly suggest that there is a large potential for a viable metapopulation in the Caucasus, but only if major conservation actions are taken towards reducing persecution and restoring prey.

中文翻译：

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减少迫害对恢复大型食肉动物比恢复猎物更有效

由于栖息地丧失、猎物枯竭和迫害，大型食肉动物目前正在从世界许多地区消失。确保大型食肉动物的持久性需要保护并有时促进其种群的扩张。因此，了解哪些保护策略，例如减少迫害或恢复猎物，最有效地帮助食肉动物重新找回原来的栖息地是很重要的。在这里，我们系统地探索了濒临灭绝的波斯豹 ( Panthera pardus saxicolor) 的此类替代策略。) 在高加索地区。我们结合了基于规则的栖息地适宜性地图和空间明确的豹种群模型来识别潜在的豹亚种群（即繁殖斑块），并测试不同程度的迫害减少和猎物恢复对整个高加索豹种群生存能力的影响生态区和伊朗北部（约 737,000 km ²）。我们确定了大量潜在合适的豹子栖息地（约 120,000 km ²)，其中大部分目前无人居住。我们的模型显示，豹子有可能在这些斑块上重新定殖，并在 100 年内增加到超过 1,000 只的种群，但仅限于中等到高度减少迫害和猎物恢复的情况。总体而言，与猎物恢复相比，减少迫害对豹子种群生存能力的影响更为显着：如果没有减少迫害的保护策略，在所有测试场景中，豹子都会从高加索灭绝。我们的研究强调了减少小群体迫害的重要性，因此当保护资源有限时，应该优先考虑。我们展示了基于个体的、空间明确的复合种群模型如何帮助量化大型食肉动物在无人居住的栖息地重新定殖的潜力，设计适当的保护策略以促进这种重新殖民，并预测食肉动物种群在替代方案下的长期前景。我们的研究还概述了如何通过基于规则的栖息地地图克服数据稀缺性，这是受威胁的范围扩大物种的典型特征。对于波斯豹，我们的预测清楚地表明，在高加索地区存在一个可行的复合种群的巨大潜力，但前提是采取重大保护行动以减少迫害和恢复猎物。