Our research projects
Bear connect
The main objectives of the BearConnect project revolve around the brown bear (or Ursus arctos) and aim at:
- Evaluating functional connectivity and factors influencing brown bear distribution, movements, and effective dispersal in current and future landscapes scenarios;
- Understanding the role brown bears have in ecosystems, with focus on trophic interactions and associated ecosystem services;
- Assessing the effectiveness of existing ecological networks for supporting the resilience of brown bear populations and associated ecosystem services;
- Providing spatially explicit guidelines for the improvement of ecological networks to be used in landscape connectivity planning for the conservation of brown bears and other species in Europe.
Beavers
We use beavers as model species to study animal behaviour and ecology in mammals. The beaver project is a long-term project that started back in 1996. Our aim is to understand the factors affecting an individual’s behavior and fitness, how such individual effects can explain population fitness, and how these patterns can be used for the management and conservation of animal populations in a human-dominated landscape with a changing climate.
Scandinavian Brown Bear Research Project
The Scandinavian Brown Bear Research Project is one of the world's longest running research projects. Since its inception in 1984, the project has marked and followed over 940 individual bears to learn more about their biology, physiology, behavior, and ecology. The project provides unique, long-term, continuous data on bear biology that becomes more valuable with each passing year. Over the last several decades, the project has made important scientific contributions to our understanding to a range of subjects including brown bear biology and ecology, animal welfare, and human health.
The long-term goal is to continue to monitor the Scandinavian brown bear population and facilitate local management decisions, contribute to the understanding of brown bear biology and ecology in the context of our changing world, and provide nature-based solutions based on brown bear physiology to the field of human medicine.
WildINTEL
The objective of the WildINTEL project is to develop a cutting-edge coordinated wildlife monitoring system based on the Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) framework. We will combine camera trapping, citizen science, artificial intelligence, and hierarchical models for the automated production of species population and community structure EBVs, with a precision that conventional monitoring schemes cannot match. This will enable stakeholders to obtain reliable and timely assessments of species conservation status and conservation actions to halt biodiversity loss.
The WildINTEL system will help mobilise and optimise the use of existing data and integrate camera-trap projects from other areas while supporting the analysis of the drivers of global change and biodiversity loss at spatio-temporal scales. We will focus on mammals, as they are condition sentinels as well as crucial indicators of ecosystem trophic integrity and global change.
