Authors: Oeser, Julian; Heurich, Marco;Kramer-Schadt, Stephanie;Kuemmerle, Tobias;

The comeback of large carnivores in Europe provides unique opportunities for restoring biodiversity and missing ecological functions, yet coexisting with carnivores in shared landscapes remains a key conservation challenge. Fostering viable metapopulations of large carnivores across Europe requires knowledge about potential habitat for range expansions, as well as on how large carnivores can adapt to living in human-dominated landscapes. We analyzed these questions for the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) integrating continent-wide animal tracking data (450 individuals across 13 countries). Using this unique dataset, we (1) compared approaches for large-area yet high-resolution habitat mapping and (2) assessed how lynx adjust their habitat selection in response to varying human pressures and landscape composition. We highlight that robustly mapping wildlife habitat at a continental scale requires accounting for regional variation in habitat selection across environmental gradients. Moreover, we show that human pressure is a main driver of variation in lynx habitat selection, determining the use of habitat features providing protection from human disturbance (i.e., forests or rugged terrain) and that such refuge habitats are essential for promoting coexistence, allowing lynx to persist in human-dominated landscapes. Together, our findings provide important new insights for the continent-wide conservation of lynx and large carnivores more generally.