Wildlife as sentinels of compliance with law: an example with GPS-tagged scavengers and sanitary regulations

Monitoring compliance with environmental laws is essential to overcoming possible implementation shortfalls jeopardizing their effectiveness. Besides improving our ecological understanding of wildlife, remote tracking technologies also allow us to take advantage of such ecological knowledge to use wildlife as sentinels of compliance with law. We illustrate this sentinel potential of wildlife using GPS-tracking of large scavengers with complementary functional traits (i.e., 21 griffon vultures and 13 wolves) to assess compliance with EU sanitary regulations allowing livestock carcass disposal in the field. Wildlife sentinels allowed the systematic evaluation of 489 livestock carcasses left in the field, which revealed an important mismatch between on-paper and in-reality implementation of these regulations. While