Steluța Manolache, Lavinia C. Pîndaru, Teodora Sin, George Kudor, Silviu Chiriac, Viorel D. Popescu

Human-bear interactions in settlements in the Romanian Carpathians, receive high media attention and political pressure, leading to the adoption in 2021 of a legislative framework enabling emergency interventions on brown bears. However, the sex- and age-class composition of bears involved in these events, and which demographic segments are most likely to be lethally removed, remain poorly understood, fueling public debates and altering tolerance towards the species. We quantified which sex/age categories of bears are targeted by authorities’ interventions and the probability that the intervention sequence ends in a lethal outcome. We analyzed the National Register of Bear Emergency Interventions for the period September 2021-October 2025. From a total of 2,758 entries containing a short description of the authorities' intervention, we retained 1,595 (58%) usable entries with sex and age class information (manually validated). We aggregated sequences of interventions into cases based on the combination of municipality, potential sex, potential age, and chronology that can be attributed to the same bear unit. A case was considered closed when a lethal intervention occurred, and any subsequent intervention with the same unit profile generates a new case. Through this procedure, we identified 614 cases out of the 1,595 interventions. The results show a pronounced heterogeneity between the groups. Females with cubs (127 cases) and adult males (52 cases) had the highest intervention intensity (mean interventions/case: 4.1 and 3.8 respectively). Lethal outcomes were most frequent for females without cubs (47.0%) and males (42.2%), and lower for females with cubs (17.7%). These preliminary results suggest that current emergency intervention practices disproportionately affect specific demographic segments, with potential implications for population structure. They also have implications for the design of more targeted, evidence-based conflict management policies.