Effects of boat- and land-based ecotourism on bears

Sometimes you have to turn over a few stones to find the treasures of the shoreline. In the same way, some of the best insight from science requires looking at a ‘system’ from a couple different vantages. 

In a new paper out last year in Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports, our team did just that.

The work is a part of a larger project that provided an assessment of grizzly bear-ecotourism coexistence. Striking new insight emerged about which bears decide to show up at ecotourism sites, and which bears stay away.

Former Raincoast Fellow and PhD student, Dr. Kate Field led the work in Nuxalk Territory. Our team included at its core Nuxalk Fisheries and Wildlife, as well as BC Parks. The goal of the five-year project was to examine if (and if so, how) ecotourism might affect the bears of the Atnarko and Bella Coola valleys, within and beyond Tweedsmuir Provincial Park. 

Within the park, there are two public ‘drive-in’ bear viewing areas off the highway. Additionally, several professionally-guided commercial drift boats anchor among fishing bears each day. Over a three-month fall season, many thousands of people come to see bears. 

In this paper, we looked at the effects of boat- and land-based ecotourism on bears with two behavioural lenses. We started with a basic research approach: watching and measuring bear behaviour under all sorts of ecotourism and environmental conditions. During summer and fall 2019-2021, we observed a range of human and salmon scenarios (zero to many of both, and combinations thereof), and how these conditions might affect grizzly feeding or alertness.

As many who watch bears might tell you, it appears that the bears are not at all fussed with human activity. At least as evaluated using the common measure that Behavioural Ecologists use; bears did not vary in their feeding or alertness behaviour across the range of human activity.

Alertness takes bears away from what they are there to do: put on pounds from precious salmon. It appeared that people didn’t get in the way of this important job for a bear in the Atnarko Valley.

Had we stopped there, we would have been incorrect in this conclusion. But we also examined a spatial dimension of behaviour. We tracked genetically identified bears up and down the Atnarko Valley for the same three years.

We had designed the study to consider that bears are extraordinarily mobile. Finding out about bears not only at the two viewing sites but instead along the entire ~35 km stretch of river and beyond would provide essential information. So, we set out an array hair-snags to monitor bears within and beyond the area of highest ecotour activity.

The hair-snags, which provide non-invasive samples of hair from which genetic information – including individual identity – can be gleaned, provided the second and more important half of our story.

From this data set we identified 118 different grizzlies, and the places they roam up and down the river.

It turns out, despite the ecotourism sites offering some of the best places for bears to fish, only a small number of bears liked spending time there. In fact, among the 80 bears for which we could evaluate their patterns of roaming, only 12 showed preference for the ecotourism area. Others showed little or no use of the area, despite its close proximity and abundant foods.

Putting the two data sets (behavioural and spatial) together provided clarity. It suggested that the behavioural data from the bears with which we (and ecotourists) had spent time observing were biased towards those individuals tolerant enough of humans to show up in the first place.

The work carried important implications for management. Given that so many individual bears tended to stay away from ecotourism tells us that any new bear viewing development in other areas would likely also displace the majority of the population, which shows avoidance of ecotourism.

This paper, which complemented two previous articles published from this study (see below), represents the final research output of the project, and collectively represents a body of new knowledge under consideration by managers from BC Parks and Nuxalk Nation for ecotour management in Tweedsmuir Park.

Related citations

Field KA, Short ML, Moody JE, Artelle KA, Bourbonnais ML, Paquet PC, Darimont CT. 2024. Influence of ecotourism on grizzly bear activity depends on salmon abundance in the Atnarko River corridor, Nuxalk Territory. Conservation Science and Practice. 6(4). doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.13097.

Field KA, Moody JE, Levi T, Darimont CT. 2025 Jan 14. Grizzly bears detected at ecotourism sites are less likely than predicted by chance to encounter conflict. Canadian Journal of Zoology. doi:https://doi.org/10.1139/cjz-2024-0102.