Human shielding from wolves facilitates jackal expansion across Europe -- dataset and code

Publicly available dataset and analysis code for:

Nathan Ranc, Christopher C. Wilmers, Luigi Maiorano, David I. Warton, Francisco Álvares, Francesca Cagnacci, Jennifer Hatlauf, Ilya Acosta-Pankov, Ovidiu Banea, Tomaž Berce, Jaroslav Červinka, Duško Ćirović, Nada Ćosić, László Gál, Giorgos Giannatos, Nuno F. Guimarães, Miklós Heltai, Gjorge Ivanov, József Lanszki, Luca Lapini, Peep Männil, Dime Melovski, Despina Migli, Marco Pavanello, Aleksandra Penezić, Anelia Petrova, Martin Šálek, Alexandra Sallay-Mosoi, Ivana Selanec, Aldin Selimovic, Tobia Sforna, Aleksandar Stojanov, László Szabó, Jasna Tarman, Igor Trbojević, Tijana Trbojević, Peter Urban, Miha Krofel. 2026. Human shielding from wolves facilitates jackal expansion across Europe. Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The dataset contains the following fields:

• key: unique howling station identifier
• country
• transect_id: y unique transect identifier
• presence: detection (1), non-detection (0)
• survey_timestamp: date and time of survey, UTC
• j_day_c1: trigonometric function of the survey julian date (see manuscript methods)
• j_day_c2: trigonometric function of the survey julian date (see manuscript methods)
• j_day_s1: trigonometric function of the survey julian date (see manuscript methods)
• j_day_s2: trigonometric function of the survey julian date (see manuscript methods)
• night_c1: trigonometric function of the time of survey (see manuscript methods)
• night_c2: trigonometric function of the time of survey (see manuscript methods)
• night_s1: trigonometric function of the time of survey (see manuscript methods)
• night_s2: trigonometric function of the time of survey (see manuscript methods)
• dist_origin: ditance from survey location to closest known origin location of jackals (see ms) in km
• forest: forest cover in %
• wolf: averaged wolf presence (0 = absence, 1 = sporadic, 2 = permanent edge, 3 = permanent core)
• snow: average number of days with snow on the ground per year
• listening log duration: duration of inter-repeat listening (log-transformed), in minutes
• dist_human: distance to closest human development (log-transformed), in km
• dist_water: distance to closest water body (log-transformed), in km
• autocov: spatial autocorrelation (see manuscript for details)
• all covariates with _sc: scaled covariate