Tag Archives: counting polar bears

Polar bear counts for W Hudson Bay: ‘core’ area numbers are not comparable

Posted on May 29, 2017 | Comments Off

Polar bear population estimates for Western Hudson Bay have recently become contentious because one specialist has been making statements that confuse the issue. As we all wait for the release of the report on the WHB aerial survey of 2016, it’s worth going over the recent history of these counts and what they have revealed.

Churchill_Polar_Bear_2004-11-15 Wikipedia

The official count for bears in WHB (used by the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group, the IUCN Red List, and Environment Canada) is 1030, based on an aerial survey of the entire region conducted in 2011 (Stapleton et al. 2014).

Since last year, Andrew Derocher (University of Alberta) has been telling any media pundit who will listen that WHB polar bears have declined from about 1200 bears in the 1980s to only 800 or so bears today (one example here) — a statement that is clearly not true. In recent months, however, whether due to complaints from the public or from his colleagues, he’s qualified that statement by saying it’s the number of bears in the “core” area of WHB that has declined.

But is Derocher’s revised statement a clear scientific interpretation of the facts? Have a look at the details below and see if you come to the same decision I have: that it’s not possible to compare WHB ‘core’ area polar bear population estimates over time.

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Posted in Life History, Population, Sea ice habitat

Tagged breakup dates, Churchill, counting polar bears, Derocher, early breakup, estimates, Ontario, polar bear, population numbers, Wapusk National Park, western hudson bay

IUCN PBSG insists the 2015 Barents Sea polar bear count was not an increase

Posted on May 1, 2017 | Comments Off

Similar to the spin on the 2013 Baffin Bay/Kane Basin polar bear population survey, the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group now insists the latest count of the Barents Sea subpopulation is not evidence of an increase in numbers since 2004, as the leader of the study announced in 2015.

Svalbard polar bear_Aars August 2015-NP058930_press release

This is Part 2 of the big surprises in the latest version of the polar bear status table published by the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) on 30 March 2017. See last post here regarding the PBSG population size estimates that no longer concur with the 2015 Red List assessment, including the global total — even though PBSG members wrote the report (Wiig et al. 2015, and its Supplement).

Here I want to focus on the results of subpopulation surveys that were made public after the 2015 Red List assessment was published, particularly the Barents Sea estimate.

While the 2013 Baffin Bay and Kane Basin estimates (SWG 2016) have been added to the new PBSG table, any suggestion that these might indicate population increases are strong discounted. Similarly, contrary to initial reports by the principal investigators of the survey, the PBSG insist that the Barents Sea population has not actually increased since 2004, which you may or many not find convincing.

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Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population

Tagged Barents Sea, body condition, counting polar bears, cubs, declining population, increasing numbers, IUCN, PBSG, polar bear, population, size, survey, Svalbard

Guest post: How ‘science’ counts bears

Posted on July 3, 2013 | Comments Off

This essay by Dr. Jim Steele, professor emeritus, San Francisco State University, is reblogged from a July 3 2013 post at WUWT post, with Dr. Steele’s permission. I am not a field biologist and have never done a mark-recapture study but Dr. Steele has. His perspective on the way polar bear biologists count bears and estimate survival in the Southern Beaufort is a perfect companion to yesterday’s post, a related post that I’ll put up later this week, and this one from December, among others. I’ve added links to the references cited in this essay where they are available, as is my custom. See the original post for Jim’s responses to comments and questions.

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Guest post by Jim Steele “How ‘science’ counts bears”

The Inuit claim “it is the time of the most polar bears.” By synthesizing their community’s observations they have demonstrated a greater accuracy counting Bowhead whales and polar bears than the models of credentialed scientists. To estimate correctly, it takes a village. In contrast the “mark and recapture” study, which claimed the polar bears along South Beaufort Sea were victims of catastrophic global warming and threatened with extinction, relied on the subjective decisions of a handful of modelers.

In mark and recapture studies, the estimate of population abundance is skewed by the estimate of survival. For example, acknowledging the great uncertainty in his calculations of survival, in his earlier studies polar beat expert Steven Amstrup reported three different population estimates for bears along the South Beaufort Sea. If he assumed the adult bears had an 82% chance of surviving into the next year, the models calculated there were 1301 bears. If survivorship was 88%, the abundance climbed to 1776 bears. If he estimated survivorship at a more robust 94%, then polar bear abundance climbed to 2490.¹ Thus depending on estimated survival rates, a mark-and-recapture study may conclude that the population has doubled, or that it has suddenly crashed.

Here are the simplified basics of estimating survival.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Conservation Status, Guest post, Population

Tagged Amstrup, Beaufort Sea, counting polar bears, Derocher, guest post, Jim Steele, mark-recapture, Polar Bear Specialist Group, population estimates, population size, recruitment, Southern Beaufort, survival