“…This legal protection has contributed to reducing and locally inverting some of the abovementioned threats (Streif, Kraft, Veith, Kohnen, & Suchant, 2012), leading to the recent recovery of a few wildcat populations across Europe (Nussberger et al, 2018; Steyer et al, 2016). This apparent turnover in European wildcats' population trends has led to the identification of locally dense populations in some European regions, where densities have been estimated to be as high as 0.29 and 0.26 ind/km 2 in Switzerland (Kéry, Gardner, Stoeckle, Weber, & Royle, 2011; Maronde, McClintock, Breitenmoser, & Zimmermann, 2020) or 0.28 to 1.36 ind/km 2 in Sicily (Anile, Amico, & Ragni, 2012; Anile, Ragni, Randi, Mattucci, & Rovero, 2014). However, this trend appears not to be occurring across much of the Iberian Peninsula where wildcat populations are suspected to continue declining (Cabral et al, 2005; Gil‐Sánchez et al, 2020; Sobrino, Acevedo, Escudero, Marco, & Gortázar, 2009).…”