Brown bear research in Europe: a review of the data collected and their value for conservation

摘要: Europe is a mosaic of landscapes shaped by human presence and activity, nevertheless it still harbors~ 18 000 brown bears, clustered in 10 populations. Brown bear management and conservation in Europe is carried out by national/regional governmental agencies and through the involvement of universities and research institutions, NGOs, protected areas’ administrations, and hunting associations. Due to their cultural and charismatic value, brown bears have been largely studied under various aspects of their biology, ecology, and management and much of this knowledge has been gathered through the collaboration of these various agents. Nevertheless, the data collected have been only partially used for research and published in the peer-reviewed literature and, therefore, may not be fully available to the scientific community and conservation practitioners. In addition, data collection and research efforts are often fragmented at an administrative level, and can be sparse and scattered or even lacking in some parts of the species range due to limited funding. Here we summarize the ecological data collected for the 10 brown bear populations in Europe, focusing primarily on movement, genetic, demographic, and diet data. We report the type of data collected, the methods as well as the geographic and temporal coverage of the data collection, the overall sample sizes, if the data were obtained at the population or country/regional level, what the data have been used for, and if results have been published. We use this information first to reveal the substantial amount of valuable data collected for the brown bear throughout Europe. Second, we …