Demographic risk assessment for a harvested species threatened by climate change: polar bears in the Chukchi Sea.

ABSTRACT: Climate change threatens global biodiversity. Many species vulnerable to climate change are important to humans for nutritional, cultural, and economic reasons. Polar bears Ursus maritimus are threatened by sea-ice loss and represent a subsistence resource for Indigenous people. We applied a novel population modeling-management framework that is based on species life history and accounts for habitat loss to evaluate subsistence harvest for the Chukchi Sea (CS) polar bear subpopulation. Harvest strategies followed a state-dependent approach under which new data were used to update the harvest on a predetermined management interval. We found that a harvest strategy with a starting total harvest rate of 2.7% (˜85 bears/yr at current abundance), a 2:1 male-to-female ratio, and a 10-yr manageme

SUBMITTER: Regehr EV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9286533 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature