📋 Tender Overview
Cantabrian brown bear population is experiencing a very hopeful recovery and increase that has allowed to reconnect previously isolated nuclei and even initiate a spatial expansion, although it is still endangered and has not achieved a Favourable Conservation Status (FCS). But this increase in the number of bears, together with bear behavioural ecology, the end of human persecution and the social changes experienced in rural areas in last decades, are associated with an increase in the negative interactions between bears and humans. One of the most worrying conflicts could be the presence of bears inside or very close to inhabited human settlements and habituated to human presence or even conditioned to anthropogenic food sources such as garbage. This situation has recently begun to be detected inside some Cantabrian villages, and each year the number increases and is starting to generate social alarm and a risk for the loss of the current favourable perception of the bear in the people living in this mountains. This project address this emerging problem by preventing and mitigating ongoing and future conflicts between bears and humans in villages and other human settlements, and reinforcing the role of the municipalities in applying best practices to resolve conflicts. The main actions of the project are capacity-building, cleaning of security perimeters in villages, dissuasive planting of fruit trees outside villages, protection of attractive elements, testing of innovative methods, monitoring and early warning of conflicts, information and awareness of local inhabitants and stakeholders of the territory and dissemination and replication of results and lessons learned in other areas of the Cantabrian Mountains. The project combines the participation of an NGO involved in the territory, the nine city councils of the municipalities with greatest presence of Cantabrian bears and the support as associated partners of the two competent regional administrations.
