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Grizzly bears are an ecologically, culturally and economically valuable species for British Columbia and Canada. Owing to this importance, many populations are intensively monitored by First Nations and Provincial governments to ensure effective and evidence-based management into the future. To monitor populations of grizzly bears, genetic tools are needed to identify individuals. Genetic markers are used to create a unique fingerprint for each individual bear, but the markers that have previously been used (microsatellites) are outdated, expensive, limited in the information they can provide beyond individual ID, and rely on subjective methods to produce a fingerprint.

This project produced a new set of 34 genetic markers for monitoring grizzly bears on the central coast of British Columbia and identified 5 potential markers informative for how bears adapt to their local environment for future use at a larger geographic scale. These monitoring and local adaptation associated markers are single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that represent small changes among the genomes of individual bears. These new genetic markers were then used to create “SNP fingerprints” for a database of 374 individual bears previously fingerprinted with outdated microsatellite markers.

This work charts the path for all future individual identification to be conducted with SNPs and provides a proof-of-concept for the ability to transition large monitoring sets to this new marker system at approximately a 10x decrease in cost. This novel marker set is inexpensive, transferable among labs, relies on objective methods to identify individuals, and is buildable to incorporate larger geographic scales or questions about how populations are isolated or how able bears are to adapt to changing pressures in their environment. This SNP tool will be used for a long-term bear monitoring project on the central coast led by the Gitga’at, Haí?zaqv, Wuikinuxv, Kitasoo/Xai’xais, and Nuxalk First Nations. Additional identified SNPs will likely be incorporated into larger monitoring sets at the scale of the province of British Columbia and beyond.