Grantee: Morteza Naderi

Institution: Koç University, Turkey

Grant amount: $29,955

Grant type: Small grants

Focal species: Brown bear (Ursus arctos)

Conservation status: Least concern

Disciplines: Population ecology, animal welfare science, human-wildlife conflict

Research location: Turkey

Project summary

Brown bears play a prominent role in the ecosystems of northern and eastern Turkey. However, there are serious long-term threats to their welfare and viability that are common to other large omnivores, such as habitat fragmentation and increasing contact with humans. For example, open garbage dumps are located across the bear’s distribution and affect behavioral patterns in bears, including seasonal migration habits, whereby the bears would normally move into different areas to exploit seasonal resources. This project will involve a collaboration with KuzeyDoga, one of the only nature conservation NGOs in Turkey, to monitor the behavior and stress physiology of individual free-living bears using GPS collars, camera traps, and blood and fecal glucocorticoids (GCs). The location and behavior data will allow them to document what stimuli individual bears have been exposed to (e.g. use of garbage dumps, proximity to roads), and when. This information can then be paired with the GC results to better understand the welfare implications of those exposures. The study of wild bears will also be complemented by the same physiological measurements on bears residing at a rehabilitation center in the region, which come from a similar genetic and early-life background to the free-living bears.

Why we funded this project

This project addresses our objective of validating non-invasive physiological welfare indicators (e.g. fecal GCs) against behavior and known environmental stressors. The pairing of wild and captive (rescued/rehabilitated) individuals is also notable because the captive individuals can serve as a sort of control group due to their controlled environment at the rehabilitation center. Although brown bears in Turkey are not as numerous as some other species we tend to prioritize research on, they and the threats they face are ecologically similar to those faced by most bears worldwide, especially North American black bears, who number many hundreds of thousands. Therefore, we expect the findings of this project to be at least partially generalizable to more than one million potentially long-lived individuals.

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