Fates and Movements of Relocated Conflict Black Bears and Interactions with Interstate 40 in the Pigeon River Gorge of Tennessee and North Carolina

Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GRSM) has a high-density American black bear population (Ursus americanus) and frequent human-bear conflicts. Relocation is a common tool used by wildlife managers to prevent further conflict incidents. I fitted 50 relocated conflict and 37 resident non-conflict bears with GPS-radio collars and found that the annual probability of recurrent conflict for relocated bears was as high as 0.627, depending on how conflicts were identified. Recurrent conflict increased with the level of food conditioning and decreased with release-site distance to the nearest urban area. Known-fate models indicated that the overall annual survival probability for relocated bears was 0.194 (lost signals censored) and survival of resident bears was higher than survival of relocated bears. My study suggests that previous research utilizing VHF telemetry and tag returns often resulted in many unknown fates, which can potentially result in the overestimation of the efficacy of relocation as a management tool. In addition to the effects of relocation, I evaluated movements of bears in the Pigeon River Gorge area along Interstate 40. Interstate 40 separates GRSM from Cherokee and Pisgah national forests, potentially creating a barrier to wildlife movement between these largely undeveloped tracts of contiguous forested habitat. I used a combination of hidden Markov models, step-selection models, and Omniscape analysis to identify whether relocated bears (used as a proxy for dispersers) differed in their movement patterns from resident bears. My results indicated that dispersers had longer step lengths while moving across the landscape and selected areas with lower percent slope and higher percent canopy, whereas residents selected for ridgelines and drainages in addition to gentle slopes and dense forest canopies. At the landscape level, resident bears had more defined movement patterns compared with dispersers who were more generalized in their movements; whereas at the roadway level both resident and dispersing bears had an overlap in defined locations along the interstate that could benefit from mitigation measures, such as underpasses or overpasses.