| Summary: | Abstract. The brown bear is the largest carnivore living in Europe, is well represented in Finland with approx. 2000 individuals and is not in danger of extinction according to the annual census size estimation which is done by Luke (Natural Resource Institute Finland). However, this has not always been the case. At the beginning of the 20th century, the bear population in Finland was drastically reduced, mainly due to illegal bear killing such as hunting or to reindeer herder protecting reindeers in the north. After legal protection of bear started in the middle of the 20th century and closer monitoring of the bear population was established, there was increase in the bear population in Finland. Many bears have immigrated from the eastern Russia (mainly Karelia). Nowadays the bear population is mainly focused on the east, near the Russian border and in the central part of Finland. The aim of this master thesis is to evaluate the social structure of the solitary living brown bear. The social structure was studied analyzing the relatedness of the brown bears and the overlap of the individual home ranges. It is believed that the higher the degree of kinship is, the more the home ranges of brown bears overlap. We measured the relatedness in two areas: In Eastern and Central Finland in order to study if there is difference in the social structure of brown bear between these two areas: We also used GPS coordinates from radio collared brown bears in order to calculate their home range size and the percentage of overlaps. A total number of 119 samples has been analyzed for their degree of genetic relationship. Furthermore, out of 119, 53 bears were marked with GPS collars. According to the results the female’s brown bears are in Central Finland more closely related to each other than females in Eastern Finland. Male bears did not show the same significant relatedness difference between the two regions. One possible explanation might be that in eastern Finland a higher number of migrations can be observed between the ...
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