As an output of the project action C.5 “Establishment and optimization of an integrated, population-level surveillance of brown bear conservation status” we prepared a report on population size estimate. The overall goal was to establish robust, effective monitoring of brown bears in our project area. Genetics is one of the most important tools for this purpose, and probably the only tool that can give reliable answers to difficult, but critical questions about a wildlife population – its size, dynamics, and long-term conservation decisions.

The first part of this specific study was to determine, as precisely as possible, the number of bears in NW Dinaric Mountains in Slovenia and Croatia. The second part of the study deals with more fundamental parameters in evolutionary and conservation biology – genetic diversity and effective population size.

Check the report to see where we concentrated our efforts during the last years. It was quite a lot of work, but it led us to a very interesting and exciting outcome.