Evaluating bear management areas in Yellowstone National Park

• Main Author: Loggers, Elise Ahlenslager
• Other Authors: Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Andrea Litt, This is a manuscript style paper that includes co-authored chapters.
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science 2022
• Subjects: Recreation areas > Access; Human-animal relationships; Grizzly bear; Wildlife management; Ursus arctos
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.montana.edu/xmlui/handle/1/16931

A growing body of research suggests large predators change their behavior near humans in ways that parallel how prey respond to predators; when outdoor recreation increases, avoiding humans becomes more difficult. Restricting human access to reduce detrimental effects of human-wildlife interactions can be an attractive management tool, however, rarely is the efficacy of such measures assessed. In 1982, Yellowstone National Park began instituting short-term, annual restrictions to areas of the backcountry containing important food resources for grizzly bears (Ursus arctos). These areas -- Bear Management Areas (BMAs) -- were intended to reduce human-caused disturbance of foraging bears and improve visitor safety. We sought to assess whether grizzly bears: 1) preferred BMAs with access restrictions more than other areas in YNP and 2) changed their response to sporadic (trail) and predictable (campsite) recreation sites depending on BMA access restrictions. We modeled resource selection of grizzly bears with step-selection functions, based on GPS locations from male and female bears collected from 2000 to 2020. Our analyses demonstrated that grizzly bears differentially selected BMAs, compared to areas outside BMAs, and that selection changed with sex and season. Bears likely prefer BMAs for the resources they contain more than to avoid people as only males changed their selection of BMAs based on access restrictions. Males avoided hiking trails during the day, but preferred trails at night. Females changed their selection of trails depending on human access restrictions and avoided trails in unrestricted BMAs. Combined with previous work, results suggest bears capitalize on the environment to avoid human presence, often with sex-specific strategies. For sporadic recreation, males temporally avoid the perceived risk of people whereas females spatially avoid the perceived risk of people. Although lower-intensity activities often are thought of as compatible with conservation, such recreation may be cryptic, but ...