Wild boar numbers to rise significantly in next 50 years

NEW modelling has predicted a significant rise in Scotland’s boar population over the next 50 years – with a hotspot persisting in Dumfries and Galloway.

Once extinct in Britain, wild boar have seen a resurgence in Scotland’s forests since the mid-1970s, likely through a combination of accidental escapes and illegal reintroductions.

To understand how Scotland’s boar population might change in the future, researchers at The James Hutton Institute, King’s College London and the Zoological Society of London collaborated on an agent-based model that incorporates boar behaviour, land cover and environmental variability.

Their findings show that Scotland’s wild boar populations are now viable and self-sustaining, with numbers expected to rise from 1472 to 2399 by 2075.

The model also predicts that boar will explore an additional 131km² each year, though they are likely to avoid highly urbanised areas such as the Central Belt. Instead, already known populations in this area, as well as the West Highlands are predicted to grow, along with less-documented populations across Perthshire, north Stirling, Moray, and Aberdeenshire.

The researchers believe their work could be used to support compensation schemes or targeted culling in the future and hope to produce new versions that simulate socio-economic impacts such as crop damage costs and hunting revenues.

Commenting, PhD student Connor Lovell said: “With wild boar back in Scotland, this model is a key step to understand where boar could go, how big their populations could be, and where they could impact ecosystems and local communities.”

The full study, titled Projecting population dynamics and range expansion of reintroduced wild boar in Scotland using agent-based modelling, is available on ScienceDirect.