Conflict Prevention Investments Keep Bears and People Out of Trouble, Now and Into the Future
You know how the saying goes: X just isn’t complete without Y. Thanksgiving and pumpkin pie. A wedding reception and an embarrassing toast. The holiday season and a delayed flight.
The two prongs of Vital Ground’s mission work that way, too. Habitat protection isn’t complete without conflict prevention. For all of our work conserving key private lands that connect wild strongholds, regional recovery and connectivity for grizzly bears will only be possible if grizzlies and people improve their ability to coexist and limit conflicts where their movement and activities overlap.
A recent grassroots study by the California Wolf Project and UC Berkeley concluded that for the Lower 48’s three most iconic and persecuted large predators—wolves, grizzlies and mountain lions—a necessity for continued recovery is “that environmental organizations and agencies form alliances with the affected communities—especially private landowners, who steward about 60 percent of the land in the United States.” The next chapter of predator conservation, the authors write, “will rely on private citizens and organizations to manage their land in ways that minimize conflict.”
Vital Ground has been implementing that study’s assessment through our One Landscape Initiative for nearly a decade, with our conflict prevention partner grants supporting local organizations and state and tribal wildlife agencies in equipping landowners and citizens with the tools and information needed for coexistence with grizzlies.
In 2025, 18 partner programs made the landscape safer for bears and people alike across all of the grizzly’s six federally-designated recovery zones in the Lower 48. From Wyoming to Washington, your support of Vital Ground enabled tangible conflict prevention through proven strategies.
Preparing the Frontiers of Grizzly Range
After receiving an initial green light last spring, federal grizzly reintroduction to Washington’s North Cascades Ecosystem is stuck in political limbo, but Vital Ground is not waiting to help the communities that would be most impacted by the grizzly’s return. On the eastern side of the ecosystem, where potential grizzly range and working lands overlap, the Methow Valley Citizens Council runs bear-aware education efforts and a bear spray rental program, while the grizzly education events hosted by Conservation Northwest help the public learn about conflict prevention strategies and build trust in the potential for coexistence.
Farther east, Washington’s northeastern corner and the northern Idaho Panhandle form the American portion of the Selkirk Ecosystem, home to less than 100 grizzlies, just like its neighboring ecosystem to the east, the Cabinet-Yaak. Connectivity between the two is limited but slowly improving, and two conflict prevention programs will help. Idaho’s Priest Lake State Park—located just a few miles from Vital Ground’s Bismark Meadows Project—installed new bear-resistant dumpsters and educational signage this year, while the Yaak Valley Forest Council launched a new bear-aware educational campaign for schools and communities in Montana’s northwestern corner.
Coexistence Around the Edges of Glacier
The Lower 48’s largest grizzly population anchors itself in the wildlands of Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness. But for this Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) population to spearhead regional connectivity through successful dispersal of grizzlies to neighboring ecosystems, bears can’t run into conflicts as soon as they cross onto private lands.
In the Flathead Valley west of Glacier, Vital Ground partners are improving that crucial coexistence through People and Carnivores’ bear-resistant dumpster program for businesses in Columbia Falls and Swan Valley Connections’ electric fencing efforts to help businesses in Bigfork secure their garbage areas. Farther south in the NCDE, between the Bob Marshall and the Mission Mountains Wilderness, the Blackfoot Challenge continues to equip landowners, with this year’s partner project an electric fencing effort for a ranch near Seeley Lake.
On the other side of the Glacier-Bob Marshall wilds, the Rocky Mountain Front region is home to the geographic and cultural border between mountains and prairie. Grizzlies are following waterways out of the high country and onto their historic grassland habitat, but they’re ending up in too many conflicts with livestock producers, farmers and communities in the process. One group leading the way for coexistence is the Blackfeet Nation Fish & Wildlife Department, with Vital Ground support helping improve their GPS collaring program that monitors bears crossing tribal lands so they can head off incidents before they happen. The landscape east of Glacier will also be safer thanks to a new National Wildlife Federation project to reduce livestock and grizzly conflicts on national forestlands just outside the park.
Meanwhile, south and east of the Blackfeet Reservation, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (FWP) serves as the front-line responder to grizzly conflicts on the prairie, and its wildlife managers work hard to help landowners head off problems through coexistence tools. Two FWP projects in the area made important strides to limit conflicts and build social tolerance along the Front. With help from Vital Ground, the state agency subsidized bear-resistant doors for several grain silos and also added two aerial drones for wildlife managers to use in monitoring and hazing bears away from potential conflict sites on agricultural lands, a new strategy that has shown early effectiveness in being more precise than other deterrents like guardian dogs, cracker shells or airhorns.
Safer Corridors To and From Yellowstone
The most important linkage for regional grizzly recovery remains unfulfilled, as the roughly 1,000 grizzlies of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) remain genetically isolated from their counterparts to the north. The gap in agency-documented grizzly range between the NCDE and GYE populations is slowly shrinking, however, now hovering around 50 miles. Robust conflict prevention will lead the way toward a long-anticipated reunion.
Bears moving south from the Glacier-Bob Marshall region must contend with a patchwork of agriculture, tourism and transportation-related threats. South of the Bob in the Little Blackfoot Valley and Avon area, ranging grizzlies will be safer thanks to FWP’s livestock carcass removal and electric fencing programs. Farther west, another potential pathway between the NCDE and GYE lies through the Bitterroot Ecosystem, a designated grizzly recovery zone that still lacks a resident, reproducing grizzly population. That population could one day contain genes from both Glacier- and Yellowstone-area bears, but first the few grizzlies who wander into the Bitterroots need to stay out of trouble. FWP is helping make it happen while building public trust in grizzly recovery through a cider-pressing and educational event in Hamilton that encourages removal of that tastiest of fall bear attractants, backyard apples.
Finally, Vital Ground proudly supported five partners in and around the GYE itself. Beyond the northern edge of the park, the Tom Miner Basin becomes many bears’ first brush with agricultural lands, and a robust community range rider and rancher outreach program helps that boundary stay safer. Meanwhile, Yellowstone’s northern gateway community of Gardiner is an inspiring leader in conflict prevention, with your support helping the Bear Aware Gardiner program distribute dozens of bear-resistant garbage bins and the North Yellowstone Educational Foundation enable a new wildlife-safe fence to be built around high school athletic facilities.
South of the park in Wyoming, GYE bears run into many risks, but improved conflict prevention can help both grizzlies and people stay safe while building social tolerance. With federal funding slim, Vital Ground stepped in this year to keep the Shoshone National Forest’s bear-resistant garbage efforts in campgrounds functioning, and in the Dubois area, Teton Valley Ranch Camp, a destination dude ranch and summer camp, became a coexistence leader through new bear-resistant sanitation measures.
As gratifying as it is to see a key piece of land protected from subdivision and development, it’s equally fulfilling to know that communities, businesses and landowners surrounding these crucial habitat areas are practicing the hard work of conflict prevention for bears and other wildlife. So as bears retreat to winter dens, Vital Ground supporters should take heart knowing you helped make the physical and social landscapes of grizzly country safer this year. These partnerships and the vital work they enable couldn’t happen without you!