Georgia Plans Its First Brown Bear Census Beyond the National Parks

Georgia’s Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture has issued a 400,000-lari tender for the first systematic brown bear census designed to go beyond the borders of national parks and nature reserves. The study will update population data, assess conservation status against current Red List criteria, and generate a national count for Georgia’s largest predator, tracked patchily inside protected areas for decades and almost never in the broader terrain that lies outside them.

The ministry has tied the study directly to the country’s Red List cycle. Georgia updates its national Red List once every ten years, and existing monitoring inside protected areas produces only a partial picture. The new survey will cover territory where, by most estimates, the majority of Georgia’s bears live.

Outside the Park Fence

Park-by-park counts give a partial sense of where bears stand. Camera traps in Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park’s wildlife monitoring program, covering roughly 105,000 hectares in the Lesser Caucasus mountains, have recorded an estimated 135 brown bears within its boundaries. Vashlovani Nature Reserve, at the arid southeastern edge of the country, holds around ten individuals. Together, those figures represent monitored sub-populations inside defined park boundaries; everything between and beyond them has no systematic tally.

Georgia’s national Red List framework, in place since 2006, places the brown bear among six mammals classified as Endangered, making capture and hunting illegal. That status was set without a comprehensive national population count. The requirement in the ministry’s new tender to survey outside park borders acknowledges that conservation policy has been built on data covering only a fraction of the country’s actual bear habitat.

The bears’ distribution follows Georgia’s terrain. Most live in mountain forests across the Greater Caucasus range in the northern and central parts of the country, with smaller populations in the Lesser Caucasus to the south and west. In the east, around Vashlovani, a community survives in semi-arid woodland, separated from the main range by heavily settled agricultural valleys. The park-level counts that currently exist came from camera trap and ranger survey efforts responding to anti-poaching priorities within specific protected boundaries, without any systematic national design behind them. Borjomi-Kharagauli’s 56 rangers lack independent arrest authority, relying on police support when illegal hunters are caught; in 2019, after 15 additional rangers joined and camera trap coverage expanded, the park made its first six arrests of illegal hunters.

A Population Count Built on Fragments

The Caucasus Estimate

The most-cited regional assessment comes from researcher Bejan Lortkipanidze, whose 2010 study of brown bear status in the South Caucasus, published in the journal Ursus, drew on fecal DNA analysis and extensive fieldwork across Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) used density calculations from those surveys done in central Georgia in 2004 and 2005 to estimate the Greater Caucasus population, then noted plainly that population trend for the region remains unknown. The Caucasus Biodiversity Council (CBC) set a separate ceiling for the entire Caucasus ecoregion.

Those estimates share one critical caveat: all derive from surveys that are now a decade or more old. Lortkipanidze described the many regional figures as being of “varying credibility among countries and periods.” Existing estimates for Georgia alone have ranged from 600 to 3,000 individuals, a spread that illustrates how little reliable census data has existed. Georgia’s new tender will be the first government-funded attempt to produce a figure built from modern Red List methodology and drawn from the full extent of the country’s bear habitat.

Isolated Pockets

Within Georgia, the population divides into sub-populations separated by roads, agricultural land, and human settlement. The stakes around that fragmentation are sharpest at Vashlovani. NACRES (the Centre for Biodiversity Conservation and Research, a Tbilisi-based Georgian conservation organization) has assessed the reserve’s population at roughly ten individuals. The migration corridor between Vashlovani and the Greater Caucasus runs through densely populated farming territory, raising serious questions about whether any genetic exchange still takes place between those bears and the main population.

If there is no genetic exchange between the arid ecosystem and the Great Caucasus range, then the population of the Lori Plateau must be considered as critically endangered, which requires special conservation measures.

That assessment, from NACRES researchers working through the Bears in Mind project monitoring human-carnivore conflict in Georgia, identifies a threshold the current data cannot resolve. Determining whether Vashlovani bears remain genetically connected to the main Caucasian population requires precisely the systematic outside-park survey the ministry’s tender now demands.

The Farm Side of Bear Country

Bears move beyond park borders, and farmers on the other side have absorbed the costs. Human-carnivore conflict (HCC) is documented and persistent in and around Georgia’s protected areas, with livestock farmers reporting predation losses wherever summer pastures overlap with bear habitat.

Research supported by Bears in Mind, a Dutch conservation foundation, measured livestock damage on summer pastures near Borjomi-Kharagauli National Park and documented losses of 25,580 lari, equivalent to roughly 8,960 euros, in a single study period. Livestock protection on those pastures was weak: cattle grazed without consistent supervision, and guard dogs worked only near the base camps at the edge of upland terrain.

That research project hit an abrupt stop in 2024. Georgia’s adoption of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which required organizations receiving foreign funding to register as foreign agents, led directly to a halt in the Bears in Mind-funded field activity in the country. The halt affected ongoing conflict mitigation work that had been testing electric fences around beehives and deterrent lighting devices on summer pastures.

Illegal captivity adds a further dimension. As of 2013, up to 50 bears were reportedly held illegally at Georgian churches, monasteries, restaurants, and private properties. Mother bears are sometimes killed so that cubs can be taken; some of those cubs die in captivity. The Endangered classification makes capture illegal, but enforcement in remote forest areas has been inconsistent.

Ten Years Between Red List Updates

Georgia’s national Red List framework, which places the brown bear among six Endangered mammals, updates on a decennial cycle. The ministry’s tender specifies that the new study must gather information “in accordance with modern Red List criteria,” the standard IUCN protocols for assessing population size, structure, and threat status. One explicit deliverable is an assessment of whether the Endangered classification remains scientifically defensible for the next review.

Globally, the IUCN Red List assessment for Ursus arctos classifies the species as Least Concern, reflecting a worldwide population estimated above 200,000, concentrated in Russia, Canada, Alaska, and Scandinavia. That global picture differs substantially from Georgia’s sub-population context, where numbers in the broader Caucasus sit in the low thousands at best, fragmentation is documented, illegal hunting is the primary identified threat, and much of the range sits outside any formal monitoring structure. As the IUCN itself notes for the Greater Caucasus specifically, population size estimates are poor or lacking and population trend is unknown.

The 10-year update interval means a survey commissioned and delivered this year feeds directly into the next national classification cycle, giving the data its most immediate policy use.

What the Contractor Must Deliver

Unusually for a government research tender, the ministry has not specified a methodology. The brief requires the winning contractor to select the approach that will produce the most accurate and reliable data on Georgia’s brown bear population. That openness signals a recognition that modern wildlife science offers several proven routes, and that ground conditions across Georgia’s unmonitored terrain may require combining them.

Research across the Caucasus and adjacent regions has tested several techniques:

• Fecal DNA analysis: Used in central Georgia in 2004 and 2005, this method identifies individual bears from scat samples without direct observation. That earlier survey identified at least 28 unique bear genotypes within a 2,113 km² study area in central Georgia, forming the basis for the density estimate currently cited by the IUCN.
• Camera trap grids: Already deployed inside Borjomi-Kharagauli, allowing individual identification from coat markings and scars across extensive terrain with minimal researcher presence required.
• Spatial capture-recapture modeling: A 2015 survey in Armenia’s Vayots Dzor region, combining camera traps with statistical models, produced a density of 59.4 bears per 1,000 km², substantially above earlier estimates for that area and illustrating how badly older ad hoc surveys can undercount fragmented populations.
• GPS collaring and radio telemetry: Provides movement and home-range data essential for assessing whether sub-populations are genetically connected, including the unresolved Vashlovani isolation question.

Outside Georgia’s protected areas, where no systematic groundwork has been done, locating active bear habitat will likely precede any count; most current large carnivore research recommends combining approaches for fragmented populations in complex terrain.

The population estimates currently in use predate any systematic outside-park survey of Georgia’s bears. The 400,000-lari study’s results will set the baseline for the next national Red List review.