Building a family tree of grizzly bears can both satisfy our natural curiosity about bear society and answer many ecologically important questions about the ways bears interact with each other and the landscape.
The grizzly family tree will allow us to answer questions about dispersal, effective population size, similarity of diet and habitat between offspring and mothers, inbreeding, and the relationship between habitat and fitness (the number of offspring a bear has). Once we address each of these basic questions, we can also evaluate the implications of our results as it relates to climate change to understand what actions are needed to conserve grizzly bears in the future. Our team is using genotypes collected across the 8 million acre Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem between 1998 and 2012 to build the family tree.
Collaborators: Kate Kendall (USGS Ecologist Emeritus), Amy MacLeod (University of Alberta), Dave Paetkau (Wildlife Genetics International).
Funding: Glacier National Park Conservancy, NSF, David H. Smith Conservation Fellowship
Below are other science projects associated with this project.
Long Term Research in northwest Montana
- Overview
Building a family tree of grizzly bears can both satisfy our natural curiosity about bear society and answer many ecologically important questions about the ways bears interact with each other and the landscape.
The grizzly family tree will allow us to answer questions about dispersal, effective population size, similarity of diet and habitat between offspring and mothers, inbreeding, and the relationship between habitat and fitness (the number of offspring a bear has). Once we address each of these basic questions, we can also evaluate the implications of our results as it relates to climate change to understand what actions are needed to conserve grizzly bears in the future. Our team is using genotypes collected across the 8 million acre Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem between 1998 and 2012 to build the family tree.
Collaborators: Kate Kendall (USGS Ecologist Emeritus), Amy MacLeod (University of Alberta), Dave Paetkau (Wildlife Genetics International).
Funding: Glacier National Park Conservancy, NSF, David H. Smith Conservation Fellowship
- Science
Below are other science projects associated with this project.
Long Term Research in northwest Montana
The Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) in northwest Montana is one of the last strongholds of the grizzly bear in the lower 48 states. Of the six established grizzly bear recovery zones, the NCDE is the third largest in area, potentially harboring the greatest number of grizzly bears, and is the only zone contiguous to a strong Canadian population. However, little information exists...