Wild boar collision data and satellite computer vision refine habitat suitability mapping across France

Abstract Wild boar (Sus scrofa) populations have expanded rapidly across Europe, leading to escalating human-wildlife conflicts (HWCs), notably wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs), increased agricultural damage and disease transmission. In continental France these issues are compounded by the species’ ecological adaptability exhibiting increasing overlaps with urbanization and transportation networks. In this study, we leverage time-series environmental data, computer vision and Species Distribution Modeling (SDM) to predict wild boar habitat suitability and investigate its spatiotemporal drivers. We use presence-only data from WVC reports on the national railway and road networks, along with publicly available GBIF observation collections, as complementary occurrence streams in our SDMs, while addressing inherent sampling biases of these datasets with tailored corrections. A key innovation of this study is the integration of national scale, annually updated high-resolution land cover predictors explicitly focused on wild boar resource preference. By fine-tuning a multitemporal Vision Transformer foundational AI model on multispectral satellite remote sensing imagery we capture subtle seasonal phenological differences. Our results highlight clear spatial, seasonal and annual variations in wild boar habitat suitability. The multitemporal SDM pipeline yields meaningful predictions when extrapolating to novel environmental scenarios such as climate extremes. Adding rail and road WVC records to GBIF-based SDMs retained high performance metrics while altering predicted spatial patterns and feature importance distribution. The methodological and ecological insights gained through this study provide additional knowledge for French transportation planning, agriculture and wildlife management. Identifying regions with high seasonal habitat suitability can inform targeted interventions. More broadly, our results demonstrate that advanced, data-driven methods are becoming indispensable for proactively and sustainably addressing HWCs in an increasingly anthropogenic world.