Keeping Visitors Safe from Bears in Yosemite with GPS Tracking
19 Oct 2014It seems that bears in Yosemite are going after more than picnic baskets these days, leaving wildlife management personnel looking for a new tool to help the more than four million park visitors from bear activity throughout the year. This tool is a GPS tracking device.
How big is Yosemite’s bear problem?
As recently as 20 years ago, it was not at all uncommon for bears to damage cars in search of food. As many as 600 cars per year became targets of bears in search of grub.
The new solution they’ve found?
Thanks to advances in GPS tracking technology over the past several years, the park is going to outfit 20 of its bears with shiny new collars complete with GPS trackers to help rangers keep up with what’s going on with bear population.
Specifically, rangers are looking for information concerning where bears are, how often they wander into campground areas, and which bears are the primary offenders.
Park officials have tried tracking bears in the past with radio telemetry, but GPS provides a much more efficient, effective, and complete tracking option as it works in even remote locations.
The president of Yosemite Conservancy, the group that donated nearly $70,000 to make this project happen, was thrilled about the addition, saying, “It’s very exciting to be able to know in real time and track them through a GPS system as they move about the park. To know where they’re spending the spring, to know where they’re spending the fall, to know where they den.”
The benefit for the bears is that rangers can keep them away from the humans camping in the bark so that bears don’t grow dependent upon visitors to provide them with food. Bears need to continue getting food for themselves rather than simply raiding food goods that humans bring with them.
Efforts thus far to manage the bear population at Yosemite have proven quite successful with an overall reduction in damage to personal property by bears of nearly 95 percent since 1998.
The same technology being used in the GPS project for bear management has been used in the past to successfully reestablish and monitor bighorn sheep throughout the park too.
It’s not just the public park officials are hoping to protect, though. The National Park Service is also concerned about bears being hit by cars announcing that 24 had been hit by vehicles with two cubs being killed after being struck by a car.
While not all of the estimated 400 black bears living in Yosemite are being outfitted with these nifty new GPS tracking devices, there is great hope that the information gleaned from the ones that are will make it worth the price paid for these trackers. And we’re only touching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to things we can accomplish with the power tool GPS tracking offers.
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