Characterizing Off-Highway Road Use with Remote-Sensing, Social Media and Crowd-Sourced Data: An Application to Grizzly Bear (Ursus Arctos) Habitat ...

• Main Authors: Kearney, Sean, Larsen, Terrence A., Goodbody, Tristan R. H., Coops, Nicholas C., Stenhouse, Gordon B.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2021
• Subjects: Ursus arctos
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0400232; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0400232

Characterizing roads is important for conservation since the relationship between road use and ecological impact can vary across species. However, road use is challenging to monitor due to limited data and high spatial-temporal variability, especially for unpaved roads, which often coincide with critical habitats. In this study, we developed and evaluated two methods to characterize off-highway road use across a large management area of grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) habitat using: (1) a ‘network-based’ approach to connect human activity hotspots identified from social media posts and remotely detected disturbances and (2) an ‘image-based’ approach, in which we modeled road surface conditions and travel speed from high spatial resolution satellite imagery trained with crowd-sourced smartphone data. To assess the differences between these approaches and their utility for characterizing roads in the context of habitat integrity, we evaluated how behavioural patterns of global positioning system (GPS)-collared ...