Does the Wolf (Canis lupus) Mediate the Conflict Between Golden Jackals (Canis aureus) and Human Activities? A Case Study from Friuli Venezia Giulia (NE Italy)

Recent long-term monitoring in northeastern Italy has demonstrated a clear macro-ecological segregation between the expanding golden jackal (Canis aureus) and the recolonizing gray wolf (Canis lupus), revealing a local top-down suppression effect that relegates jackals to less rugged, highly fragmented valley bottoms and lowlands. Building upon these established spatial dynamics, this study aims to evaluate whether this competitive exclusion translates into a structural shift in the economic conflicts generated by both canids as they interact with human activities. We cross-referenced regional wildlife occupancy patterns with official compensation registries for carnivore damages spanning 2009–2025. Raw conflict data (e.g. livestock depredation, vehicle collision) were aggregated into unique harmful events (N = 486 total events) based on distinct incident identifiers to prevent data inflation. Piecewise linear regression models (breakpoint analysis) were applied to detect chronological and structural turning points in both the number of affected municipalities and economic costs across the establishment (2009–2019) and expansion (2020–2025) phases. Total indemnities reached €146,800 for wolves (n = 194 events) and €39,100 for golden jackals (n = 86 events), with synchronized exponential growth after 2020, concentrating 150 wolf events and 74 jackal events in the last five years (2021–2025). For the wolf, structural breakpoints occurred in 2020 for affected municipalities and 2022 for economic magnitude, remaining strictly bound to alpine and pre-alpine areas (96.1% of expansion-phase events). Conversely, the golden jackal's geographic breakpoint occurred in 2019, followed by an economic surge in 2023. As stable wolf packs saturated core mountain habitats, golden jackal-related conflicts shifted latitudinally toward the Karst and Lowland Plain, which hosted 88.1% of expansion-phase jackal events. This lowland displacement into human-dominated landscapes triggered a unique, rising proportion of vehicle-collision claims (19.3% of total jackal events). The fine-scale wolf-jackal avoidance mechanisms documented for northeastern Italy carry important management implications. The top-down pressure exerted by wolves indirectly shapes the socio-economic landscape, displacing mesopredator-human conflicts out of natural mountain ranges into infrastructural lowlands, fundamentally modifying the types of human wildlife conflicts.