The impact of roads on the demography of grizzly bears in Alberta.

ABSTRACT: One of the principal factors that have reduced grizzly bear populations has been the creation of human access into grizzly bear habitat by roads built for resource extraction. Past studies have documented mortality and distributional changes of bears relative to roads but none have attempted to estimate the direct demographic impact of roads in terms of both survival rates, reproductive rates, and the interaction of reproductive state of female bears with survival rate. We applied a combination of survival and reproductive models to estimate demographic parameters for threatened grizzly bear populations in Alberta. Instead of attempting to estimate mean trend we explored factors which caused biological and spatial variation in population trend. We found that sex and age class survival was

SUBMITTER: Boulanger J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4274100 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature