Kasper Mickos, University of Helsinki

Conflicts between humans and brown bears are increasing around Europe. In the Habitats Directive of the European Union (EU), bears are strictly and equally protected in all EU countries, resulting in traditional bear hunting quotas being suspended in many core bear range countries. Where hunting has served as the main method for conflict mitigation, e.g. Finland, this has led to both bear numbers and conflicts increasing rapidly. Thus, (re-)learning and developing methods for coexistence and conflict mitigation is also urgent in core bear range countries.

A key issue behind conflicts is bear damages to food production, with apiaries, i.e., managed beehives and honey therein, being especially prized by bears. The most common method for protecting apiaries from bears is electric fencing. However, these fences are labour and resource-intensive, and their efficacy has not been systematically investigated in Finland. Thus, my 1st study question is: How effective and cost-efficient are electric fences in protecting apiaries from bears?

Bears’ fear of humans and the resulting avoidance behaviours are recognized as crucial facilitators of human-bear coexistence. We know from playback experiments that hearing the human voice causes a fear response in large carnivores, often resulting in them fleeing the area. This leads to my 2nd study question: if bears flee when hearing human sounds, could we use playbacks of these as added protection of food production sites from bear damages?

Preliminary results suggest that the effectiveness and costs of electric fencing vary markedly: improvements and added protections are necessary to halt increasing damages. I will lay out a path for further development of anthropogenic sounds as bear deterrents based on my current field work. My results have wide applicability in helping the development of both novel and existing methods for coexistence to help limit the Europe-wide increase of human-bear conflicts.