San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance Journal January 2022

Keeping Watch

Autonomous monitoring is a technological advantage for polar bear conservationists. With these hardy devices, scientists can focus on denning behaviors like never before.

BY IAN INGRAM | SDZWA

A polar bear mother gives birth to her cubs in a snow cave she has constructed to wait out the long, dark months of the Arctic winter. The cave becomes her maternal den. Researchers can learn a lot from studying bears’ behavior around their maternal dens. Simply recording things—like when mothers emerge with their cubs in spring, the amount of time they spend in and out of the den after that, and when they finally abandon the den to return to roaming the Arctic sea ice—can provide valuable insights into polar bears’ lives, and how the bears respond to the pressures of their surroundings, including those that we humans have brought about.

Focus on DenCams

The dens are extraordinarily inaccessible, both because of the topography and remoteness of their locations and because of the extreme temperatures and weather during the time of year when the bears emerge. Nonetheless, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance has worked for years in collaboration with Polar Bears International and the Norwegian Polar Institute to observe them. We have deployed increasingly sophisticated sensing systems near the dens to collect video and image data of the bears’ activities. These include trail cameras, but also a series of bespoke devices we simply call DenCams. The original DenCam gathered masses of valuable data about the polar bears, but was a beast to haul out to these remote and often mountainous places. In recent years, we have found ways to bring down its size, leading to the newest incarnation of the project: the Mini DenCam. A Mini DenCam is simply a computer-controlled video camera packed in a box tough enough to survive Arctic conditions. It is powered by large solar panels, but also has ample battery capacity to make it through the darkest part of the polar winter, before those panels get sufficient sun. The newest versions use cutting-edge battery chemistry that is even tougher in freezing temperatures, and more long-lived. The system is equipped with heaps of space to hold all of the videos it collects over a long season watching bears. Different lenses can be fitted in the field, depending on where it is deployed, relative to the den.

Smaller Is Better

The primary modification that allowed us to bring down the size of the DenCams was adding a tiny computer, running custom software to control them. Using our own software meant we no longer needed to include a few of the larger hardware components that had been required in the previous systems, and it allowed us to reduce the size of other components, including the video camera itself. The computer controls the recording from the camera, manages the storage of the resulting videos, runs an interface for people to configure the system in the field, and logs other data about the system’s operation and surroundings, like temperature and information about how much power is coming from the solar panels. This data helps us learn even more about the environment of polar bears, but also helps us refine the engineering of the Mini DenCam itself to better optimize it for its intended purpose. All in all, the reduction in the number—and the volume— of its innards has meant the whole Mini DenCam is but a cub in size when compared to its DenCam mother. There remain, however, problems to solve. By the time in the season that the researchers arrive at the site of the maternal den, the bear is already safely ensconced in the den, with the entrance hidden beneath layers of ice and snow. The researchers know the general location of the den from the GPS fix they receive from the bear’s collar, but that still leaves a need for a fair amount of approximation in setting up and aiming a Mini DenCam toward the den.

Moreover, the camera’s field of view must be set to cover a wide enough area to guarantee that it covers the den’s location. Particularly in the remote, frozen islands of Svalbard, north of Norway, where the terrain is exceptionally rugged, this can be challenging. In the final videos captured by the system, the polar bear and her den might be quite small in the frame, and the cubs, of course, are even smaller! This data is still a gold mine of information for the researchers studying the bears, but even more could be gleaned if the Mini DenCams were only smart enough to recognize the bear and zoom in on it.

Get to the Pinpoint

An experimental descendant of the Mini DenCam, code-named Pinpoint DenCam, sets out to do just that. It would wait patiently for weeks watching a swath of snow-blanketed mountainside, constantly checking each frame of its video feed for the presence of a polar bear, using a machine-learning algorithm that has been trained specifically to recognize the distinctive shape of the bears. Then, when it does finally see the bear poke her head out from the snow for the first time in months, the system swivels to it and zooms in. With this simple action, this autonomous system—a keen little, polar bear-obsessed Arctic robot, if you will— would give us an even richer picture of the life of a mother polar bear, and of her young cubs who are seeing the world outside the den for the very first time. At this stage, Pinpoint DenCams exist only as prototypes. They currently do not watch cliffs covered in snow for bears, but instead scan hills covered in sage and cactuses for the species found in our own backyard Biodiversity Reserve, next to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. And, of course, they spend a lot of time on the bench in SDZWA’s Conservation Technology Lab. Here, toy animals, and even people, get to play the role of polar bears when we test the capabilities of these little robots, as they await the moment they are ready to fly off in a helicopter to remote parts of Svalbard and join our efforts to save species.

Ian Ingram, M.S., a population sustainability senior researcher for SDZWA, leads the Conservation Technology Lab.

Promoting humanpolar bear coexistence

Why it matters in a warming world

BY GEOFF YORK AND MEGAN OWEN, PH.D.

As human activities continue to disrupt and extend into wildlife habitat, and drive changes in the ranging patterns of wildlife, challenges to human-wildlife coexistence are an intensifying keystone conservation challenge. From tigers in Sumatra to savanna elephants in northern Kenya, conflicts can arise when large wildlife species’ ranges overlap with human communities. For polar bears, developing approaches to ensure the safety of both people and bears is of critical importance. Historically—and unlike experiences with the brown bear in North America and Europe, or the sloth bear in India—contact and conflict with people occurred at a low and consistent rate for generations of polar bears and indigenous peoples. But, as Bob Dylan sang, “the times they are a-changin’”—and for the Arctic, change is occurring more rapidly than either polar bears or people have ever experienced.

Too Close for Comfort

People who live, work, and recreate across the Arctic appear to be encountering polar bears with more frequency, and in places where polar bears were once either rare or were completely absent. Recent research confirms that polar bears are indeed spending more time ashore, and in larger numbers than in contemporary history—at least in some regions. Climate warming is driving a rapid and persistent reduction in summer sea ice and, as a result, more polar bears will be forced to decide: do they stay on the sea ice as it melts ever farther from shore and productive waters, or do they come ashore? Loss of sea ice is also opening the Arctic to increased human use. This creates an environment for increased conflict, which often has negative outcomes for both people and polar bears. Front-line conservation managers also worry about a time in the not-so-distant future when a series of bad sea ice years may place a large number of food-deprived bears all too close to communities. What then? We know from wildlife efforts around the world that successful conservation relies heavily on the people who live and work in those shared habitats, especially for predators and large mammals. We talk a lot about the ecological carrying capacity of a given species or habitat, but all too rarely do we talk about the social carrying capacity—that is, the tolerance of the people who share that space with a given species. It’s very easy to say “save the polar bears,” but it is quite another thing to live with polar bears in your backyard, where your children play.

Tolerance Is Critical

Successful conservation requires a strong tolerance for living with a given species. One way to build that tolerance is to ensure that people who live and work in polar bear country have the information and tools they need to keep themselves and their families safe. A key part of this effort is to reduce negative interactions between people and polar bears, and minimize potential conflict. To fulfill our mission, we understand the need to work both on the pressing conservation needs and issues of today, like conflict, while also doing our part to address the enduring threat of climate-driven habitat loss. Polar bears need us to be successful as we address both immediate and longer-term threats. Creating safe communities while supporting efforts to keep both visiting workers and tourists safe will directly benefit polar bears today, while building critical tolerance for this amazing but potentially dangerous species. What we love most about these efforts is that they truly require action and effort from everyone in the Arctic— communities, industry, scientists, managers, and visitors. Efforts to date have been both grassroots (based on community initiatives and volunteers), or more top-down, like the excellent work being done by Manitoba and Nunavut in Canada, the North Slope Borough in Alaska, and Sysselmannen in Norway, at the regional government level. One thing we must remember across the Arctic: people live here, and many still live low-impact, traditional lives, relying on wildlife for food. While polar bears are magnificent animals and respected by all, they are also predators, and can threaten local residents. Imagine having polar bears in your neighborhood, park, or backyard: this is a reality of life in some northern towns. We have to listen to the concerns of local communities, and work to support the solutions they identify as fitting their needs and their culture.

Geoff York is senior director of conservation for Polar Bears International. He has worked with polar bears and Arctic issues for more than 20 years. Megan Owen, Ph.D., is vice president of conservation science at SDZWA.