The research, led by Kat Douglas of Georg-August-Universität Göttingen together with Zahra Ebrahimi Monfared, Seyedhamed Mirkarimi, Adrian Paterson, and Mahmood Soofi, drew on face-to-face interviews with 292 residents across 30 villages lying within five kilometers of the park boundary. Interviews were conducted between April and November 2022 by two local field researchers, one male and one female, with 71 percent conducted in Turkmen and the remainder in Farsi. Respondents included livestock herders, crop farmers, beekeepers, teachers, and freelancers, reflecting the mixed livelihoods of a landscape where Turks, Kurds, Fars, Baluch, and Sistani communities live alongside some of Iran’s most threatened mammals.

Golestan National Park is a fitting laboratory for such questions. Established in 1957 as Iran’s first biosphere reserve, it covers roughly 91,895 hectares and rises from 450 to 2,411 meters, encompassing Hyrcanian temperate forest, steppe, and semi-arid habitats. The park shelters urial, bezoar goats, red deer, and roe deer, and with them the leopards, wolves, and bears that prey on them or, in the bear’s case, raid the crops and hives of surrounding farms. As human populations and agriculture have expanded through the Hyrcanian forests, negative interactions have intensified, and retaliatory or precautionary killing of carnivores remains a common response to livestock loss.

What sets this study apart is its analytical framework. Rather than treating attitudes as a simple product of economic damage, the team used Bayesian structural equation modelling, a statistical technique capable of estimating multiple direct and indirect pathways simultaneously among latent constructs such as beliefs, norms, and attitudes that cannot be measured directly. The workflow proceeded in two steps: first a confirmatory factor analysis verified that survey items reliably measured their intended constructs, with all retained items loading above 0.40 and reliability coefficients such as McDonald’s omega ranging from 0.78 to 0.83; then a structural model tested how cognitive beliefs, social beliefs, perceived management responsibility, and livestock loss shaped attitudes toward each species separately.

The headline finding is strikingly consistent. Across all three species, cognitive beliefs, the individual’s evaluations, knowledge, and perceptions of carnivores, emerged as the strongest and most reliable predictor of attitudes. For bears the standardized path coefficient reached negative 0.72, for wolves negative 0.63, and for leopards negative 0.48, with 95 percent Bayesian credible intervals that excluded zero in every case. Respondents who felt carnivore conservation was unimportant, or who believed that any carnivore attacking livestock should be killed, held markedly more negative attitudes overall. In other words, the mind, not the wallet, appears to be the primary battleground of coexistence.

Social beliefs, the expectations of family and fellow villagers about retaliatory killing, also pushed attitudes in a negative direction, though their direct effect was weaker and, in the leopard model, the credible interval overlapped zero. More intriguingly, social beliefs were positively associated with cognitive beliefs in all three models, suggesting that when peers endorse killing carnivores, individuals’ own perceptions of carnivores as dangerous are amplified. The authors caution that social desirability bias, in which respondents answer as they believe their community expects, may partly shape such patterns, a well-known hazard of attitudinal surveys. Even so, the indirect pathway points to a clear lever: shifting community-level norms could ripple through individual belief systems and soften attitudes toward predators.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive result concerns livestock loss itself. Included as an observed variable in the leopard and wolf models, it showed only a weak, statistically uncertain relationship with attitudes, with coefficients near zero and credible intervals spanning zero. Reducing the material costs of coexistence, while still vital for household welfare, appears insufficient on its own to change how people feel about carnivores. The bear model dropped livestock loss entirely, a logical choice given that brown bears in northern Iran mainly raid orchards and beehives; one study found 44 percent of negative interactions involved orchards and 32 percent beehives, against just 13 percent livestock attacks. Notably, human-caused mortality records from Iran between 1980 and 2021 show bears were killed more often than wolves or leopards, but chiefly over threats to human life and crops rather than depredation of herds.

Perceived management responsibility added another layer of nuance. The belief that government should capture and relocate carnivores after an attack was associated with more positive attitudes, an effect that was statistically credible for leopards and wolves, though modest in magnitude. Yet in the wolf and bear models this same variable correlated with more negative cognitive beliefs, hinting that institutional expectations and personal belief systems operate somewhat independently. The context matters: in Iran, compensation schemes for wildlife damage are widely described as bureaucratic and rare, and the survey confirmed this, with only 1.7 percent of respondents, five people, reporting ever receiving compensation. Post-attack support limited by funding and paperwork is known to contribute to illegal retaliation.

Several hypothesized drivers refused to stay in the models. Emotions such as fear, pride, and happiness were removed after destabilizing the analysis, though exploratory estimates hinted that positive emotions favored positive attitudes. The authors suspect social desirability bias may be at play, since roughly half of respondents reported minimal fear of leopards, wolves, or bears, a pattern that could reflect genuine tolerance or reluctance to appear afraid. Demographics including age, gender, ethnicity, literacy, and occupation were also excluded, as were legal and participatory variables, the latter perhaps reflecting the fragmented legal framework surrounding conservation in Iran. Women were underrepresented at 16 percent of the sample, a limitation rooted in cultural barriers rather than sampling design, and the authors acknowledge that the final models were deliberately simple, with two items per construct.

The practical implications reach well beyond Golestan. Because cognitive beliefs dominate attitude formation, education programs that explain the ecological role of carnivores, recalibrate perceived danger toward realistic risk, and teach practical protection, from electric fencing and guardian dogs to fox lights and other non-lethal deterrents, may do more for coexistence than compensation checks alone. Because social norms feed individual beliefs, community-wide engagement rather than one-on-one persuasion is likely to be decisive. And because trust in management shapes attitudes, transparent, participatory governance deserves a place alongside any mitigation toolkit. The authors emphasize that their findings are local in origin but plausibly generalizable in mechanism, since belief systems, social norms, and institutional perceptions recur across human-carnivore contexts worldwide. Coexistence, this study suggests, is negotiated less in pastures and orchards than in the shared beliefs of the people who live there.

Subject of Research: Local community attitudes toward large carnivores around Golestan National Park, Iran

Article Title: Claws, consequences and coexistence: Local community attitudes toward large carnivores in mountain landscapes

Article References: Douglas, K., Monfared, Z. E., Mirkarimi, S., Paterson, A., & Soofi, M. (2026). Claws, consequences and coexistence: Local community attitudes toward large carnivores in mountain landscapes. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02486-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02486-9

Keywords: large carnivores, human-wildlife coexistence, Persian leopard, grey wolf, brown bear, Golestan National Park, conservation psychology, Bayesian structural equation modelling, social norms, cognitive beliefs, livestock depredation, Iran

The research team, led by Yu Endo of the Hokkaido Research Organization collaboration, analyzed 49 brown bears sampled from all six management units defined in Hokkaido’s brown bear management plan, from the Oshima Peninsula in the southwest to the Doto region in the east. Using double digest restriction-site associated DNA sequencing, or ddRAD-seq, the researchers generated millions of autosomal genetic variants, alongside X-chromosomal markers, and compared these with previously published mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal data. The result was one of the most detailed genomic portraits of any insular brown bear population to date.

The genetic structure analyses told a consistent story. Principal component analysis, fineRADstructure clustering, and ADMIXTURE all separated the southern subpopulations of South Oshima and South Ishikari from the central and eastern subpopulations of Central Hidaka, Central Sohya, and East Doto. The differentiation between south and rest was substantial, with FST values ranging from 0.047 to 0.089, while differentiation among the central and eastern subpopulations was weak. Notably, the boundary between the southern group and the rest coincided with the boundary between two of the three mitochondrial lineages, clade 4 and clade 3a2, but the boundary between clades 3a2 and 3b found no clear support in the autosomal data.

That asymmetry is the fingerprint of sex-biased dispersal. In brown bears, as in most carnivores, males disperse far from their birthplace while females stay near where they were born. In Hokkaido, adult male home ranges span 199 to 496 square kilometers, whereas females occupy just 13.4 to 43 square kilometers. Because mitochondrial DNA is inherited only through mothers, it records female movement, which is limited; the Y chromosome records male lineages, which mix freely; and the autosomes record both. The Hokkaido bears show exactly the pattern predicted by extreme male-biased dispersal: structured mitochondria, unstructured Y chromosomes, and autosomes in between.

The team quantified this bias using Q statistics, which compare genetic drift on the X chromosome with drift on the autosomes. If effective population sizes and dispersal are equal between the sexes, Q converges on 0.75. In the Hokkaido bears, all Q values fell well below that expectation, ranging from 0.324 to 0.463, indicating that X-chromosomal differentiation was stronger than expected under sex-neutral demography. Because brown bears show no confirmed bias in sex ratio or in reproductive success between the sexes, the most parsimonious explanation is male-biased dispersal, which reduces the effective migration of X-linked variants relative to autosomal ones.

Demographic modeling with fastsimcoal2, using more than 11 million autosomal sites, tested five scenarios of population change. The best-supported model was a single bottleneck: the effective population size began declining roughly 80,663 years ago, with a 95 percent confidence interval of about 59,000 to 102,000 years, and the decline ended around 31,834 years ago. Those dates place the crash squarely within the Last Glacial Period, which ran from approximately 70,000 to 10,000 years ago. After the bottleneck, the model detected a rapid recent expansion, consistent with a population that now numbers around 12,200 individuals as of 2022.

Why did the population crash? The answer appears to lie in climate. The researchers built species distribution models using Maxent, trained on occurrence records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and seven uncorrelated bioclimatic variables, dominated by precipitation of the driest quarter, mean temperature of the wettest quarter, and temperature annual range. Projecting the model onto paleoclimate surfaces for the Last Glacial Maximum around 21,000 years ago revealed that relative habitat suitability in Hokkaido was low. During that period the island was covered largely by coniferous forest, grassland, and tundra, and palynological records indicate that oak nuts, a staple of the brown bear diet, were scarce. The absence of Late Pleistocene brown bear fossils on Hokkaido further supports the inference that the island was marginal habitat at the height of the ice age.

Landscape genetics added a second layer to the story: geography shaped the recovery. Mantel tests, partial Mantel tests, and resistance modeling with ResistanceGA all showed that low elevation, not high elevation, acted as the main barrier to gene flow. The Ishikari lowland, which separates the southern subpopulations from the rest of the island, emerged as the region of lowest estimated migration in EEMS analysis. During the mid-Holocene this lowland contained a brackish lake, oxbow lakes, and extensive peatlands, environments poor in the forest foods bears depend on. Crucially, the lowland barrier signal appeared in mitochondrial and autosomal data but not in Y-chromosomal data, meaning females were impeded by the lowlands while males crossed them with ease. In other bear species, such as the American black bear and the Asiatic black bear, highlands act as dispersal barriers; Hokkaido’s bears are unusual in that their movements are constrained by the flats.

Synthesizing these lines of evidence, the authors propose a three-act demographic history. First, bears migrated into Hokkaido from Eurasia before the Last Glacial Period, though the exact timing and whether the three mitochondrial lineages were already geographically separated remain unresolved. Second, as glacial climate shrank suitable habitat, the population contracted and retreated, allowing different mitochondrial lineages to become fixed in different refugial regions, a process consistent with the random differential fixation proposed by earlier whole-genome work but now tied to a specific climatic mechanism. Third, after the climate ameliorated, the population expanded, and because dispersing males carried their genes across the island far more effectively than philopatric females, the Y chromosome and much of the genome were homogenized while the maternal lineages retained their separate distributions. The nuclear genome of Hokkaido’s bears is monophyletic relative to the continent, confirming that this mixing happened entirely on the island after colonization.

The findings carry practical weight for conservation. Hokkaido’s bears endured a severe cull-driven decline in the 1990s, and human-bear conflict is rising again as the population stabilizes. The study’s genomic results align with the subpopulations designated in the current management plan but argue for recognizing the southern subpopulations as a distinct unit, given their clear genetic differentiation. More importantly, the authors argue, management should focus not only on how units are divided but on maintaining connectivity between them, particularly through the lowlands that have constrained female dispersal for millennia and are now dominated by roads, farms, and urban development. A population that once rebounded thanks to the wandering habits of its males may depend, in the coming century, on whether those same corridors remain open.

Subject of Research: Sex-biased dispersal and post-glacial demographic history of the Hokkaido brown bear population

Article Title: Male‐Biased Dispersal Leads to Expansion After Decline: The Hokkaido Brown Bear (Ursus arctos) Population Rebounds Post‐Last Glacial Period

Article References: Endo, Y., Osada, N., Mano, T., Nagano, A. J., & Masuda, R. (2026). Male‐Biased Dispersal Leads to Expansion After Decline: The Hokkaido Brown Bear ( Ursus arctos ) Population Rebounds Post‐Last Glacial Period. Ecology and Evolution, 16(9), Article e74312. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.74312

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/ece3.74312

Keywords: brown bear, Hokkaido, sex-biased dispersal, mitochondrial DNA, Y chromosome, population genomics, Last Glacial Maximum, landscape genetics, ddRAD-seq, fastsimcoal2, species distribution modeling, wildlife management