Sorting municipalities in Umbria according to the risk of wolf attacks with AHPSort II

In Italy, the recent wolf expansion process is the result of a series of historical, natural, ecological and conservation related factors that have characterized the Italian environmental context during the last few decades. The difficulties in broaching the environmental management of the wolf species have increased economic conflicts, mainly with livestock farmers. To facilitate and pacify the debate, an assessment of the risk of wolf attacks on livestock farms in Umbria’s municipalities needed to be carried out. For this assessment, AHPSort II, a new multi-criteria sorting method for a large number of alternatives, has been developed. This is used for sorting the alternatives into predefined, ordered risk categories. It requires far fewer comparisons than its predecessor, AHPSort. This sorting method can be applied to different environmental problems that have a large number of alternatives. In our case study, AHPSort II requires only 1.4% of the comparisons that would have been required by AHPSort. Combined with clustering, only 0.54% of the comparisons are required. The resulting map shows that a high number of municipalities are at risk, especially those near protected areas.