Humans and bears - Wild encounters

[brotherbear]

BEARS of the last frontier... Most bears need space - lots of space. In the case of a male grizzly bear in an inland North American ecosystem, this amounts to perhaps five hundred square miles, sometimes more. This means that bears make perfect "umbrella species": Protect them and you incidentally protect countless other species of plants and animals that happen to utilize smaller areas within a bear's home range. Bears also function in two other ways ecologically as indicator and keystone species. As an indicator species, bears provide a litmus test for the health of an ecosystem, and as a keystone species, they actually play an important role in maintaining that ecosystem's health.  Reply