DOI: 10.5061/dryad.1zcrjdg1f
title: Data from: Behavioural responses of brown bears to roads and hunting disturbance

description: Harvest regulations commonly attenuate the consequences of hunting on
 specific segments of a population. However, regulations may not protect
 individuals from non-lethal effects of hunting and their consequences
 remain poorly understood. In this study, we compared the movement rates of
 Scandinavian brown bears (Ursus arctos, n = 47) across spatiotemporal
 variations in risk in relation to the onset of bear hunting. We tested two
 alternative hypotheses based on whether behavioural responses to hunting
 involve hiding or escaping. If bears try to reduce risk exposure by
 avoiding being detected by hunters, we expect individuals from all
 demographic groups to reduce their movement rate during the hunting
 season. On the other hand, if bear avoid hunters by escaping, we expect
 them to increase their movement rate in order to leave high-risk areas
 faster. We found an increased movement rate in females accompanied by
 dependent offspring during the morning hours of the bear hunting season, a
 general decrease in movement rate in adult lone females, and no changes in
 males and subadult females. The increased movement rate that we observed
 in females with dependant offspring during the hunting season was likely
 an antipredator response because it only occurred in areas located closer
 to roads, whereas the decreased movement rate in lone females could be
 either part of a seasonal activity patterns or be associated with an
 increased selection for better concealment. Our study suggests that female
 brown bears accompanied by offspring likely move faster in high-risk areas
 to minimize risk exposure as well as the costly trade-offs (i.e., time
 spent foraging versus time spent hiding) typically associated with
 anti-predator tactics that involve changes in resource selection. Our
 study also highlights the importance of modeling fine-scale spatiotemporal
 variations in risk to adequately capture the complexity in behavioural
 responses caused by human activities in wildlife.
description: # Data from : Behavioural responses of brown bears to roads and hunting
 disturbance
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1zcrjdg1f](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1zcrjdg1f) This dataset contains movement data from brown bears equipped with GPS collars during 2016-2019 in south central Sweden. The dataset was used to determine the effect of distance to the closest road on the movement rate of brown bears, while controlling for time of day (solar time in radians), hunting season (Before hunting and Bear hunting) and demographic groups of bears. ## Description of the data and file structure log_sl_: log of step length (m/h) Road_C: distance to closest road in meters (standardized; (obs-mean)/sd) Road: distance to closest road in meters (raw) suntime: solar time standardized in radians (sunrise at pi/2 sunset at 3pi/2) hunting: hunting period as factor (11 days before hunting (Before) vs 11 first days of bear hunt (Bear)) bearyear: bear-year id Stat: demographic groups (WC = females with offspring; S = lone females; J = subadult females; M = males) timestep: time step (used for autocorrelation structure; determines how far apart observations are from each other)