New insights from European bison ecology

How much do we know about the ecology of a species that went nearly extinct? For many extirpated species what we observe today reflects only a fragment of their historical range, thus our ecological expectations are drawn from a truncated version of the reality.

We address this challenge using the largest European bison dataset ever compiled. Our results confirm that European bison are a generalist species, adjusting their habitat use to what is available. We further show that in contemporary landscapes, croplands are perceived by bison as resources, even if this requires tolerating higher levels of human presence.

Our findings suggest to assess carefully where to reintroduce bison in the context of resources availability and potential with conflicts (i.e., croplands are highly available), rather than in specific habitat types.

See the full paper here: Retez, G., Oeser, J., Bluhm, H., Chistopolova, M., Hernandez-Blanco, J. A., Klich, D., Olech, W., Perzanowski, K., Pkhitikov, A., Kowalczyk, R., Quétier, F., Skorupski, J., Aldea, A., Borowik, T., Catanoiu, S., Grancea, A., Heidelberg, A., Iosif, R., Kamiński. T., Kibiša, A., Minaev, A.N., Paulauskas, A., Seyidova, Z., Sipko, T., Šimkevičius, K., Tracz, Maciej, Tracz, Magdalena & Kuemmerle, T. (2025). Habitat preferences of European bison in contemporary European landscapes. Journal of Applied Ecology e70233.