From the archive
11 Aug 2026
Nobody traps a Marsican brown bear to count it. During 2025, researchers from ISPRA and Sapienza University covered the animal's entire known range in Italy's Central Apennines — around 6,000 square kilometres — and collected 854 hair samples. From those, genetic analysis picked out 70 individual bears. Scaled up, the estimate for the whole subspecies stands at around 81 animals: 43 females and 38 males, a population that exists nowhere else on Earth.
The census, run under Italy's DigitAP project, is the most complete picture ever assembled of the bear, and it divides the range into three rings. The historic core, centred on the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park, holds about 56 bears and has been stable or gently rising for a decade. Fold in the recently colonised edges — Valle Roveto, the Monte Genzana Alto Gizio Reserve — and the figure climbs to 65, a single continuous population. Then there is the outer ring: just 16 bears, scattered through peripheral country.
The numbers underneath are the uncomfortable ones. The core supports roughly 4.4 bears per 100 square kilometres; the periphery supports 0.4. Distance alone doesn't explain it. Areas joined to the core by suitable habitat corridors carry significantly more bears than areas equally far away but poorly connected, and areas with more road deaths, poisoning and poaching carry fewer. The researchers' conclusion is that these peripheral landscapes could hold many more bears — expansion is not failing for want of habitat, but for want of connection and lower mortality.
That gap is where Rewilding Apennines has been working, with local partners under the EU-funded LIFE Bear-Smart Corridors initiative — restoring orchards along the corridors, fitting bear-proof bins, running community outreach, and fencing off beehives and poultry runs with electric wire. The census gives that work a deadline: 16 bears are too few to hold on their own. Whether the number grows rests not on the park, which has done its job, but on connected corridors, fewer road deaths and poisonings, and villages willing to share the ground.
If you keep bees, poultry or a fruit orchard where bears or boar roam, a two-strand electric fence is the single measure that changes behaviour — a weekend to install, then check the wire monthly and keep vegetation off it. In the Central Apennines, the LIFE Bear-Smart Corridors programme has supplied fencing, bear-proof bins and orchard restoration through municipalities: ask your comune what is available before buying your own kit.
Rewilding Europe · Read the source