Bear Identification
Noninvasive technologies to identify and monitor bears, facilitating their conservation.
Brown bears are native to Eurasia and North America and live mainly in forests, from lowlands up to 5,000 m.2 Around 200,000 remain, with the largest populations in Russia, the United States and Canada.2 The species is listed as Least Concern worldwide,1 but it has disappeared from parts of its range and declined sharply in others.2
Why it matters
Where salmon run, bears are part of how the ocean feeds the forest. They carry fish away from the water and leave the rest to foxes, eagles, ravens and gulls, and the nitrogen in those remains reaches the trees: up to 24% of the nitrogen in riverside woodland has been traced to salmon.3
Under pressure
In Europe, the Carpathians hold the largest populations of brown bears, wolves and lynx, with the highest concentration in Romania.4 Bears and people there share the same valleys, and encounters around villages and farms are where conflict, for both, begins.
What we do
In British Columbia, our bear identification work recognises individual bears from their faces in camera-trap photos. In the Carpathians, our bear deterrence project spots bears at the edge of Romanian farms and scares them off, harmlessly, before conflict starts.
Projects
Bear Deterrence in the Carpathians
Utilizing low-power technology to detect and deter bears from encroaching on Romanian farms.
Live demos
Bear Identification
Facial recognition that tells individual bears apart from photos, tracking British Columbia's black bear population over time.
Bear Detector for Human Wildlife conflicts
Detecting and deterring bears near Romanian farms so people and predators can coexist.
Tools
Animal reID
A modular computer vision framework for individual animal identification using state-of-the-art techniques including metric learning, local feature matching, and spot pattern analysis across multiple species.
Blog posts
A guide to designing a bear face recognition system
Identify bears with Metric Learning.
A guide to designing a bear face segmentation system
Detecting bears in real time using low-power technology.
How to build a real time bear detection system
Detecting bears in real time using low-power technology.
Open to collaboration
Every project here was built hand in hand with conservation partners, and much of the code is open source. If our work fits a challenge you're facing, or you'd like to build something together, we'd love to hear from you.