The immediate effects are the vegetation losses. Fires kill shrubs and trees. They have the immediate effect of displacing bears. But in the long term, fires often produce more food for bears, he said. That's beneficial to many species of wildlife.
Dead trees fall over and become homes for ants and insects, which bears eat.
You get this lush growth of grass, then shrubs come up. The canopy is open. A lot of the fires in the Bitterroot Valley were in places where we don't want bears anyway. The long-term goal would be a population of 280 bears distributed over 5,785 square miles of wilderness and national forest lands. Servheen said the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park gave scientists a chance to monitor the effects of wildfire on grizzly bears.