Influence of Livestock and Electrified Fences on Livestock Depredation and Habitat Selection by Grizzly Bears in the Mission Valley, Montana

Balancing protection between livestock and carnivores has been a long-standing challenge in conservation. When encounters between carnivores and livestock or humans result in conflict or livestock depredation, the safety of both wildlife and humans are at risk. Reducing livestock depredation by grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) will be important as populations continue to recover and expand beyond public lands in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. We used GPS locations from 8 female grizzly bears spanning 5 years in the Mission Valley, Montana, to evaluate the effect of livestock on habitat selection of grizzly bears. The Mission Valley is located on the Flathead Indian Reservation, where grizzly bears have been historically revered; however, modern cultural diversity complicates current management. We found a positive relationship in habitat selection for streams and wetlands by grizzly bears. We found that bears did not select for livestock, and that livestock did not have an effect on selection of streams or densities of homes or roads. Whereas electric fencing has been frequently used to protect bee apiaries from depredation by bears in North America, they have only recently been used to protect crops and livestock against grizzly bears. Maps based on our results can be used to identify how and where electric fencing efforts could be focused to reduce livestock depredation. We identified 20 sites with small livestock that had electrified fencing and 72 sites that were unfenced in 2018. We monitored 12 electric fences surrounding small livestock and recorded the presence and behaviors of grizzly bears in the Mission Valley during 2018 – 2019. No depredations occurred when livestock were inside a properly functioning electric fence, and 7 livestock depredations occurred at sites without electrified fencing. This suggested that electric fences were effective at reducing livestock depredations by grizzly bears. Though different attitudes about grizzly bears exist on the Flathead Indian Reservation, proactive and non-lethal actions can be implemented by residents to minimize future conflicts between livestock and grizzly bears. Securing small livestock, agricultural crops and livestock feed inside of an electric fence can prevent conflict in the Mission Valley

Multidisciplinary engagement for fencing research informs efficacy and rancher-to-researcher knowledge exchange

Across much of the Western United States, recovery of large carnivore populations is creating new challenges for livestock producers. Reducing the risks of sharing the landscape with recovering wildlife populations is critical to private working lands, which play an vital role in securing future energy, water, food, and fiber for an ever-expanding human population. Fencing is an important mitigation practice that many ranchers, land managers, and conservationists implement to reduce carnivore-livestock conflict. While fencing strategies have been reviewed in the literature, research seldom incorporates knowledge from the people who utilize fencing the most (i.e., livestock producers). Incorporating producers and practitioners early in the process of producing scientific knowledge is proving to be a critical endeavor for enhancing knowledge exchange, better evaluation of the practice, and more realistic understanding of the costs and benefits. Here, we describe how our multidisciplinary effort of co-producing knowledge informs understanding of the effectiveness of various fencing designs and more importantly provides a better mechanism for transferring this knowledge between producers, researchers, and land managers. We explain the process underway and demonstrate that incorporating producers and practitioners from the onset allows research priorities and expected outcomes to be set collaboratively, gives transparency to the agricultural community of the research process, provides a critical lens to evaluate efficacy and functionality, and will inform the practicality of fencing as a conflict prevention tool. We discuss opportunities and challenges of this co-production process and how it can be applied to other realms of fencing and conflict prevention strategies