Developing a quantitative hunting regionalization framework: A new game management tool

Abstract

[Aim of study]: Monitoring and control the hunting activity is primordial to guarantee its sustainability. However, the governmental agencies responsible to manage hunting commonly are unable to adequately do this job because the thousands of small private hunting states, associated exclusively by political-administrative criteria. In this work, we provided a new management tool through the establishment of a hunting regions system. [Area of study]: Castilla-La Mancha region, central Spain. [Material and methods]: We used a two-stage procedure to establish the environmental units than, afterwards, were characterized on a set of hunting variables. [Main results]: We generate a hunting regionalization with 12 hunting regions and proposed regional hunting yields for each of the hunting regions. [Research highlights]: The use of hunting regions will permit to define the game management practices more appropriately on a large scale, but also, will facilitate the tasks of assessment, management and monitoring of game of the number hunting states included in each hunting region.