Brown bears Ursus arctos were historically persecuted and almost eradicated from Southern Europe in the 20th century as a result of hunting and direct persecution (Zedrosser et al. 2011; Martínez Cano et al. 2016). The effects of human induced mortality were exacerbated by other threats, such as habitat loss and fragmentation, due to the expansion of human populations (Swenson et al.
The increasing trend of large carnivore attacks on humans not only raises human safety concerns but may also undermine large carnivore conservation efforts. Although rare, attacks by brown bears Ursus arctos are also on the rise and, although several studies have addressed this issue at local scales, information is lacking on a worldwide scale. Here, we investigated brown bear attacks (n = 664) on humans between 2000 and 2015 across most of the range inhabited by the species: North America (n = 183), Europe (n = 291), and East (n = 190).
Modelling landscape connectivity represents one of the central challenges for conservation of natural resources,
especially in human dominated landscapes. Many different methods have been developed to this effect, but their
assumptions and limitations have been largely ignored. Using high resolution GPS tracking data from brown bears
(Ursus arctos) in central Italy, we investigated the influence of behavioural state (movement vs other behaviours), sex,
About 100 km east of Rome, in the central Apennine Mountains, a critically endangered population of ?50 brown bears live in complete
isolation. Mating outside this population is prevented by several 100 km of bear-free territories. We exploited this natural
experiment to better understand the gene and genomic consequences of surviving at extremely small population size. We found
that brown bear populations in Europe lost connectivity since Neolithic times, when farming communities expanded and forest burning
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