Bears in America: Are conservation efforts working?

It's USA TODAY Network's Bear Week! We've partnered with Explore.org to bring you live video streams of bears in the wild at Alaska's Katmai National Park.

There are eight bear species in the world that face different challenges depending on where they live.

In the USA, bear conservation efforts have had positive results for black bear and grizzly bear populations in the lower 48 states, Gregg Losinski, a conservation educator with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, told USA TODAY Network.

It's important to protect bears and ensure their populations are healthy because they indicate how the environment is doing overall, he said.

"If you can manage something very big and obvious like a grizzly bear and make sure he has a very healthy habitat, it probably means that a good part of the natural system that they're in is doing well," according to Losinski.

USA TODAY Network looks at the status of the two bear populations most prominent in North America.

THE AMERICAN BLACK BEAR

The American black bear, which lives in the USA, Canada and Mexico, has the healthiest population by far, Dave Garshelis, a bear biologist with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), told USA TODAY Network.

Though the exact number is not known, Garshelis estimates there are 800,000 to 900,000 American black bears in the world while there are 300,000 to 350,000 other bears combined.

The strong population is primarily a reflection of controlled mortality rates through hunting, according to Garshelis.

"It seems like a paradox that this species is hunted almost everywhere it exists and it's thriving," he said, but controlled and monitored hunting means there are lots of people involved in monitoring the species, illegal hunters are caught and population levels are maintained.

"Through regulated hunting, we are able to have lots of bears, plenty of bears," Losinski said, adding that Idaho has about 20,000 black bears and legally hunts 2,000 a year. Most of the recovery success stories were funded by hunters who paid fees to legally shoot game, and those fees have paid for the majority of habitat restoration, he said.

Anja Heister, director of the wild and free-habitats campaign for In Defense of Animals, said such efforts serve only the interests of hunters.

"I think we can live with, and we should live with, other animals without killing them," she said.

GRIZZLY BEARS

Grizzly bears, a subspecies of brown bears in the lower 48 states, were listed as threatened in 1975 by the Endangered Species Act. Grizzlies, once prevalent in the American West, were intentionally eradicated when pioneers settled in the West.

A more aggressive species than the black bear, grizzlies were seen as a threat, and the government offered bounties to people who killed them, according to Garshelis. Their population in the West dropped from about 50,000 in the early 1800s to 800 to 1,000 bears in the 1970s, according to the National Park Service and the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service.

The Endangered Species Act helped stabilize that number and increase it.

"People couldn't just shoot the bears," Garshelis said. "There was very strict protection with a lot of enforcement." In the 1970s, 136 bears lived in the Greater Yellowstone area, according to the National Park Service. Today, there are almost 600 grizzlies in the area, the National Park Service reports, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports there are 1,400 to 1,700 overall.

"Grizzly bears are clearly increasing and are doing reasonably well, given the fact that in the past, they were hit so hard and 98% of their range in the lower 48 states was wiped out," Garshelis said.

PROBLEMS PERSIST

American black bears and grizzly bears are part of a larger picture, and all is not well in bear country. The IUCN maintains a global comprehensive "Red List of Threatened Species." The eight bear species are categorized as follows:

1. Giant panda: threatened

2. Sun bear: vulnerable

3. Asiatic black bear: vulnerable

4. Sloth bear: vulnerable

5. Andean bear: vulnerable

6. Polar bear: vulnerable

7. Brown bear: least concern

8. Black bear: least concern

Follow @lagrisham on Twitter