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Monitoring the Brown Bear in the Italian Alps through non-invasive genetic sampling
Marta DeBarba
Major Professor: Dr. Lisette Waits
Marta is working on a very small and endangered population of brown bears (Ursus arctos) isolated in the Italian central-eastern Alps, in the Western Trentino area. Currently, this population has 15-17 individuals and includes bears translocated from Slovenia and their offspring. Her project is the experimental part of a monitoring program that will be carried out routinely by the regional managers and biologists to monitor the brown bear population in Western Trentino.
She is using non-invasive genetic sampling to collect hair and feces in the field as a source of DNA. The DNA obtained is processed using modern genetic tools to provide species, individual, and sex identification. Since this brown bear population is no longer tracked using radio telemetry, these genetic data can provide important demographic and reproductive information and can support bear-human mitigation policies in an environment with high human population density.
Further, she is testing the effectiveness of different non-invasive sampling methods to detect animals in small populations, and exploring the reliability of these techniques in the field combined with statistical modeling in estimating population size and trends in small brown bear populations.
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