Wolves returning to the French Jura

Find your issue, and check it is measured

An environmental issue: something happening, to something, because of something, with proof that somebody measures it.

Wolves returning to France through the Alps have reached the Jura, a region of cattle farming and Comté cheese. There, a protected top predator now shares the pastures with herds grazing in the open.

Proof it is measured

The wolf presence records of the OFB, France's national wildlife agency, opened: every sighting, dropping, track and howl reported since 2013, each rated by an expert as wolf or not, by commune.

In the news

France 3, 16 October 2024: six wolves killed in the Jura massif in 2024, four of them shot in the Doubs after attacks on livestock, and five packs living across the French-Swiss border.

The system

Store: the wolves living in the Jura. Inputs: young wolves dispersing from the Alps and Switzerland, and births. Outputs: deaths (culling, road traffic) and dispersal onward. Food: roe deer and chamois, and livestock where herds are exposed. Feedback: attacks on herds lead to culling orders.

Write your research question

One sentence naming the indicator and its units, the years and the places. No strategy in it.

What is the relationship between year and the number of communes with confirmed wolf evidence in the Ain, Doubs and Jura departments, 2013 to 2024?

Independent variable

Year, 2013 to 2024.

Dependent variable

The number of different communes (the smallest French local authority, like a parish) with at least one piece of evidence confirmed as wolf in that year. Ain, Doubs and Jura are three departments, roughly counties.

Why communes, not records

A count of records rises with search effort. A count of communes measures how widely wolves are found.

Not obvious

We expect wolves to spread. We do not know how strongly, or whether steadily or in a sudden jump: that is what the test and the figure answer.

Find a real-world strategy and its tensions

One real-world strategy people are genuinely arguing about, two named positions, and what the tension does.

France's National Action Plan on the wolf and livestock farming: the 2018 to 2023 plan, renewed for 2024 to 2029 with a trial of defence shooting (shooting a wolf that is attacking a herd) for cattle herds in the Doubs.

The strategy

The 2018 to 2023 plan, published 19 February 2018, aimed for a viable population (one large enough to survive) of 500 wolves and allowed 10 to 12% to be shot each year. The 2024 to 2029 plan, published 23 February 2024, keeps herd protection funding and raises the ceiling to 19%. In the Doubs it ran as a trial from 13 June 2024 to the end of 2025. Defence shooting was allowed for more than 100 cattle farms in 17 communes of the Comté area, where herds were judged impossible to protect.

Position 1 · economic, political

Géraldine Grangier, deputy for the Doubs, in a written question to the government (22 October 2024): cattle need the same protection as sheep, the shooting rules leave neighbouring herds exposed, and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté recorded 252 wolf attacks in 2023.

Position 2 · environmental

LPO Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, the regional bird and nature protection charity (3 September 2024): calling herds impossible to protect is only an excuse for culling, and a wolf should only be shot once protection has been tried.

The tension

Farmers' income from open-grazed cattle against the recovery of a protected species. Cattle on large Jura pastures are hard to fence or guard, so protection is expensive. Shooting removes wolves from packs that have only just formed.

What it does

Resistance: Ferus, One Voice and the Pôle Grands Prédateurs had two Doubs shooting orders annulled by the Besançon court on 18 June 2024. Uneven costs: farmers bear the attacks, and the wolves bear the culling.

For the environment

Culling breeding adults can break up a new pack, which can change where wolves hunt and how far they range.

Link to the question

The plans set how many wolves may be shot as the population grows and spreads. The question measures that spread in the Jura across both plans.

Select and document your data

A dataset you can defend: counted, documented, and cut to a rule fixed before you looked.

Source

OFB Réseau Loup-Lynx (the agency's wolf and lynx monitoring network), Les indices de présence du Loup, downloaded as one CSV through the map service link on the data.gouv.fr page. 67,212 records for all of France.

Filters

Department (d) is 01 Ain, 25 Doubs or 39 Jura. Verdict (f) is Retenu, meaning confirmed as wolf. Years 2013 to 2024.

Inclusion rule

Confirmed records only. Duplicates removed on the reference code (r). 2025 left out because records are still being analysed and national reporting fell that year.

Derived quantity

For each year, the number of different communes (c) with at least one confirmed record.

How the numbers were made

Evidence reported by OFB staff, parks, hunters, foresters and the public, then rated by OFB experts, some by genetic test. Locations are blurred to the commune on purpose.

Credit

OFB, Réseau Loup-Lynx, under Licence Ouverte 2.0 (France's open-data licence), with the date downloaded.

Treat your data

Run a statistical test, leading to figures you built and a statistical result.

Spearman's rank correlation, two-tailed, at p = 0.05.

Why this test

A relationship between year and a count. A spreading population may grow in jumps rather than in a straight line. Spearman's only asks whether the count keeps rising or falling.

Decided before running it

n = 12 years. Critical value about 0.587 (check it in the table you cite). Free calculators: Social Science Statistics, Geography Fieldwork.