Hello, bear! Remote cameras effectively monitoring grizzly bears in mountain parks

Research shows the network of remote cameras set up throughout the Rockies is effectively monitoring grizzly bears in the national parks.

In a paper for the September issue of Biological Conservation, scientists with the University of Montana and Parks Canada reviewed the technology as a wildlife monitoring tool.

“It brought together a bunch of efforts that have been going on across five national parks to put up remote cameras to monitor wildlife,” said Robin Steenweg, one of the lead authors on the research and a PhD student in wildlife biology at the University of Montana. “It’s a newish, emerging technology that has a lot of promise.

“So, we tested the promise of this new technology as a cost-effective way to monitor species at risk.”

The research found the cameras can create a “robust monitoring” project for carnivores such as grizzly bears — provided there’s enough cameras set up on the landscape and advance planning put into the project.

It’s an important finding for the network of more than 500 remote cameras throughout Banff, Yoho, Kootenay, Jasper and Waterton national parks, which started around 2011.

“A lot of people were using remote cameras, but we didn’t have a good sense of how many we needed and how we should distribute them on the landscape,” said Jesse Whittington, a wildlife ecologist in Banff National Park who’s a co-author on the paper.

The results, he said, show that they have enough cameras in their monitoring system to detect changes in the population of grizzly bears using the parks.

It’s believed there are about 60 grizzly bears in Banff National Park and another 15 each in Yoho and Kootenay.

Whittington said other research, such as DNA surveys, can be both expensive and labour intensive so the remote cameras can be used to help to provide valuable information in the years between the use of other methods.

Steenweg said they recommend having cameras out for months rather than weeks and keeping them in the same locations to provide the best data.

“We tested this starting first with grizzly bears,” he said, explaining it was a strong test because a lot is known about grizzly bears in the national parks.

“Being able to use this method and compare it with other methods, like DNA surveys that have been going on in the park, we could then confirm whether or not it’s an appropriate tool,” Steenweg said. “We found that it is, which means it has lots of promise for other species that we don’t have much data on, like wolverine, lynx and expanding species like red fox, white-tailed deer, (and) bobcats.”

Both Steenweg and Whittington said it shows that it has a lot of promise as a research tool to continue monitoring grizzly bears and other large mammals going forward.

“I find it amazing how much our wildlife populations can change even in our protected areas,” said Whittington, noting there’s been a lot of change in the past few decades. “We’ve seen wolves rebound, elk decline by 75 per cent from unnaturally high numbers to normal levels and white-tailed deer, which were rarely seen 30 years ago, increase into alpine areas.

“Our remote camera network will be vitally important to monitor how wildlife populations adapt to climate change and factors such as changing snow conditions, fire frequency, vegetation and parasites.”

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