Forestry practices, roads at heart of grizzly bear study

A recent University of Alberta study showed it doesn’t matter what forestry practices are used, it’s human encounters on roads that deplete the province’s grizzly bear population.

Biology professor Mark Boyce said roads aren’t bad, it’s the people who use them who cause the problem. “It’s how one manages the roads that matters. Gate it, lock it, keep people out,” he said.

Regulations require industry roads in the province to be gated, but the government does little in the way of enforcement, Boyce said. 

While it was previously believed that cutting down trees in a way that mimicked the size and shape of natural fires as opposed to the traditional checkerboard pattern would cause less stress to the ecosystem, this study shows that’s not true – at least for grizzlies, said assistant professor Scott Neilsen.

Natural disturbance-based forestry can be less productive and require a higher road density as loggers may access less convenient locations. “It’s not about the size and shape of cut block, it’s roads, roads, roads,” Neilsen said. “It kind of reaffirms what we’ve always known.”

Roads in and out of logging areas increase the animals’ risk of death through human-bear conflict, vehicle-caused collisions, poaching and displacement from feeding and habitat areas.

One issue with roads is that they offer increased food production, as the bears are interested in the clover and dandelions that grow along the shoulder, Neilsen said. “You’re bringing bears into a dangerous area, it’s an ecological trap,” he said. “Where the bears are using these resources but lack the ability to distinguish risk association.”

Though grizzlies lack the resiliency to quickly bounce back, it is possible to slowly bring the populations back up. “It can happen is the good news,” Neilsen said. “Yellowstone (Park) within the last decade has increased, they just completed a DNA census, and their numbers were much higher than they anticipated.”

Specifically, the study showed that the less-than-500 grizzly bears in the province could grow in population size by up to five per cent per year if roads were controlled. 

The research was conducted in a 9,800-square-kilometre area of Alberta that includes parts of Jasper National Park. Forty grizzlies were fitted with GPS radio collars and tracked to monitor their foraging and bedding patterns for five years.

The study was completed as part of a larger grizzly bear project by the Foothills Research Institute based in Hinton. It was funded in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the University of Alberta and the Alberta Conservation Association.