Continuous updating of the number and status of territories

The information shown here on the number and status of territories corresponds to the current state of knowledge reported by the federal states to the DBBW.

Current information from the federal states on the confirmed territories of a current monitoring year is initially published by the DBBW on the website subject to the provisionality and incompleteness. After completion of the monitoring year, the comprehensive evaluation of the collected data follows with regard to the number and status of wolf territories in each federal state. The results are then presented to the other federal states, the DBBW and the BfN each autumn at the National Monitoring Meeting and jointly discussed.

Following the meeting, the findings are published annually in the form of the Map of Wolf Territories in Germany or the Status Report for Germany. Should new findings make it necessary to retroactively change the number of territories or the status of individual occurrences, this will not be done in the status report, but only online.

The section Confirmed Territories offers the possibility to reflect the most current knowledge about the territories at any time by updating the underlying data. Generally, subsequent changes occur for the following reasons:

• The detection of a new pack usually leads to a retroactive classification of the occurrence as a pair in the previous monitoring year. This occurs because the parents must have already mated in the rutting season before the end of the monitoring year if they have pups in May, with the start of the new monitoring year.
• Renewed genetic detection of an individual animal whose first detection was in an earlier monitoring year, without the temporal-spatial prerequisites having previously been met to classify the animal as territorial. This applies equally to new genetic findings on pairs.
• New genetic findings may also lead to the need to make changes to the status of territories for years longer in the past. Mostly this is evidence of earlier reproductions, made possible by new findings in the reconstruction of the relationships of wolves, which lead to the fact that an occurrence must be classified as a pack in an earlier year than was originally the case.