Black bears (Ursus americanus) are an iconic and common species throughout much of the United States and people regularly interact with these large predators without conflict. However, negative interactions between people and bears can manifest in conflicts that can hinder conservation efforts. Black bears are highly attracted to anthropogenic sources of food, and negative interactions with people are primarily a product of trash mismanagement. In the Catskills region of New York State, home to a large population of black bears, over 400 such conflicts are reported each year. While the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has seen progress recently in educating residents of the region on how to reduce unwanted interactions with bears, they have had less success educating the 12 million tourists that visit the Catskills each year. Understanding where conflict may occur in the future, and the environmental and anthropogenic factors that precede it, may help guide management strategies to reduce these unwanted interactions. Therefore, we designed resource selection probability functions (RSPFs) to examine the relationship between human-black bear conflicts in the Catskills with a suite of landscape and anthropogenic data, using conflicts reported to the DEC across the state of New York in 2018-2019. We found that human-black bear conflicts were more likely to occur in the residential areas of the Catskills on the urban-wildland interface; areas with relatively higher human population densities, away from dense forest, and further from heavily urbanized areas. While future work is needed to continuously validate our model predictions, our results will provide the DEC and other conservation managers in the Catskills the ability to create more targeted plans for mitigating unwanted human-black bear interactions, and provide a better understanding of the mechanisms driving human-carnivore interactions at an urban-wildland interface more generally.

中文翻译：

---

使用资源选择概率函数对纽约卡茨基尔地区的人类与黑熊相互作用进行绘图和建模。

黑熊（Ursus americanus）是美国大部分地区的标志性常见物种，人们经常与这些大型掠食者互动，不会发生冲突。然而，人与熊之间的负面互动可能会表现为冲突，从而阻碍保护工作。黑熊对人类食物源高度感兴趣，与人类的负面互动主要是垃圾管理不善的结果。在纽约州卡茨基尔地区，这里是大量黑熊的栖息地，每年都会报告超过 400 起此类冲突。虽然纽约环境保护部 (DEC) 最近在教育该地区居民如何减少与熊的不必要互动方面取得了进展，但他们在教育每年访问卡茨基尔山的 1200 万游客方面却收效甚微。了解未来可能发生冲突的地点以及冲突发生之前的环境和人为因素可能有助于指导管理策略，以减少这些不必要的相互作用。因此，我们设计了资源选择概率函数 (RSPF)，利用 2018-2019 年纽约州向 DEC 报告的冲突，通过一系列景观和人为数据来研究卡茨基尔地区人类与黑熊冲突之间的关系。我们发现，人类与黑熊的冲突更容易发生在城市与荒地交界处的卡茨基尔山脉的居民区；人口密度相对较高、远离茂密森林、距离高度城市化地区较远的地区。虽然未来的工作需要不断验证我们的模型预测，但我们的结果将使 DEC 和卡茨基尔的其他保护管理者能够制定更有针对性的计划，以减轻不必要的人类与黑熊的相互作用，并更好地理解驱动机制更普遍地讲，城市与荒地界面上的人类与食肉动物之间的相互作用。