Research projects

Urban human-black bear conflicts occur when bears, attempting to access anthropogenic food in developed areas, damage human property (e.g., vehicles, buildings), create threats to human safety, are lethally removed or enter collisions with vehicles. Possible strategies to manage conflict include hunting quotas, relocating, hazing or lethally destroying "problem" bears, wildlife and garbage ordinances to reduce the availability of anthropogenic attractants, education (e.g., flyers), proactive enforcement (e.g., courtesy notices of violation) and reactive enforcement (e.g., fines), financial incentives and infrastructure providence (e.g., bear-resistant garbage containers). The efficiency of these strategies is not always documented and it can be challenging for stakeholders to identify available and impactful tools. The goal of our project is to evaluate (1) which strategies exist (availability), (2) what specific needs they address (assumptions), (3) how they can be implemented (feasibility) and lay a foundation of policy understanding to evaluate their effectiveness in the future. We aim to create a policy portfolio that will be available to stakeholders to make informed decisions.

Urbanization is an extreme form of land use alteration, with human development driving changes in the distribution of resources available to wildlife. Some large carnivores have learned to exploit anthropogenic food resources in urban development, resulting in human-carnivore conflict that can have detrimental impacts to people and carnivores, as exemplified by American black bears. Management agencies commonly promote the use of bear-resistant garbage containers for reducing conflicts, but little is known about the actual behavioral responses of bears to this intervention. To understand whether black bears alter their behavior in response to changes in residential waste management, we investigated patterns of bear behavior in Durango, Colorado, where anthropogenic attractants were experimentally manipulated. Using location data from collared black bears, we modeled resource selection and movement in response to areas that had received bear-resistant garbage containers compared to those that did not. We highlighted the importance of reducing the availability of anthropogenic attractants for changing bear behavior and reducing risk of urban human-bear conflict, and found that these responses can strengthen over time as bears learn from the management intervention.

Carnivore populations globally have largely declined, and coexistence, where humans and carnivores share landscapes, plays a crucial role in carnivore conservation. However, the term “coexistence” is often used in scientific and popular literature without being clearly defined. We aimed to provide a global perspective on what coexistence is and how it is studied. We conducted a systematic map to characterize human-carnivore coexistence literature according to coexistence definitions, temporal trends, geographic and taxonomic focus, and four thematic aspects of coexistence: carnivore ecology, human endeavors, social conflict and human-carnivore conflict. We offered a definition of coexistence that incorporates the four thematic aspects of coexistence encountered in the literature: Co-occurrence of sustainable carnivore populations and human endeavors with minimal human-carnivore and human-human conflict. We encouraged researchers to focus on the social dimensions of coexistence, such as human attitudes towards carnivores or the underlying causes of social conflict, and to broaden the taxonomic and cultural breadth of their projects.