On March 30th, the public presentation of the “Strategic and Action Plan for Wild Boar in Portugal” took place at the headquarters of the Alentejo Regional Coordination and Development Commission (CCDR-Alentejo). The plan was promoted by the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF) and funded by the Permanent Forest Fund.
The presentation of this plan was given by the project’s Responsible Researcher, Rita Tinoco Torres (CESAM/DBIO), in a session attended by researcher João Carvalho (CESAM/DBIO), ICNF Executive Board President Nuno Banza, Secretary of State for Agriculture Gonçalo Rodrigues, and Secretary of State for Nature Conservation and Forests João Paulo Catarino.
This Plan, along with the data presented in it, as well as the evidence of the growing impact of wild boar on human activities, lead the researcher to state that: “the continental national territory has a generally overabundant population of wild boar, and this overabundance may be particularly relevant in certain landscape and socioeconomic contexts.”
As a way to reverse the trend of growing wild boar populations and aiming to reconcile their presence with the surrounding ecological, sanitary, and socioeconomic context, a combination of different approaches is suggested. These range from limiting the temporal period of feeding to increasing the annual extraction rate, extracting specific age classes and sexes, and applying greater effort during the first quarter of the hunting season (hunting drives).
The development of the Strategic and Action Plan for Wild Boar in Portugal was based on collaboration among various groups, from academia and government agencies to hunting sectors and local communities. According to Rita Tinoco Torres, “this collaboration should be the necessary paradigm to address the emerging challenges involving this species.”
Text by: Rita Tinoco Torres (CESAM/DBIO) in collaboration with CESAM