REAL-TIME RISK RADAR FOR BEARS

Navigating the Wild

We are shifting from a world where wildlife is restricted to nature reserves to one where we share our spaces with them. Many designated nature reserves are now too small to sustain healthy wildlife populations, so animals are increasingly venturing into human-dominated areas. This overlap can lead to dangerous encounters, risking harm to both people and wildlife. While humans have coexisted with wildlife for centuries, many traditional practices for safe interactions have been lost. Today, we have advanced tools to help prevent conflicts and ensure safer human-wildlife coexistence.

Wageningen University, in collaboration with Sensing Clues and other Nature FIRST partners, is developing a real-time Risk Radar for Bears. Similar to weather radars predicting rain, our human-bear-conflict radar identifies areas at high risk of bear encounters.

The Bear HWC Radar aims to provide timely risk information, helping people take preventive measures and avoid conflicts. We use a data-driven approach that combines scientific and heuristic bear knowledge, open-source land cover data, and local records of bear activity and conflicts to ensure our assessments are accurate and current.

The schemas below illustrate the steps taken to create the real-time Risk Radar for Bears. The Bear Radar's first live demonstration will be at the Eco Bear Conference in Tusnad in October 2024.