As large carnivores recover throughout Europe, their distribution needs to be studied to determine their conservation status and assess the potential for human‐carnivore conflicts. However, efficient monitoring of many large carnivore species is challenging due to their rarity, elusive behavior, and large home ranges. Their monitoring can include opportunistic sightings from citizens in addition to designed surveys. Two types...

Assessing conservation strategies requires reliable estimates of abundance. Because detecting all individuals is most often impossible in free‐ranging populations, estimation procedures have to account for a .