Black Bear Behavior and Movements Are Not Definitive Measures of Anthropogenic Food Use.

Increasing human-bear conflicts are a growing concern, and managers often assume bears in developed areas are food-conditioned. We examined the relationship between human-bear conflicts and food conditioning by analyzing isotopic values of hair from black bears () involved in research ( = 34) and conflicts ( = 45). We separated bears into and subgroups based on the impervious surface within their home ranges and separated conflict bears based on observations of human food consumption ( = observations; = no observations). We initially assumed wild bears were not food conditioned and anthropogenic bears were. However, using isotopic values, we classified 79% of bears and 8% of bears as food conditioned. Next, we assigned these bears to the appropriate food conditioned category and used the categorizations as a training set to classify developed and management bears. We estimated that 53% of bears and 20% of bears were food conditioned. Only 60% of bears captured within or using developed areas showed evidence of food conditioning. We also found that δ13C values were a better predictor of anthropogenic foods in a bear's diet than δ15N values. Our results indicate that bears in developed areas are not necessarily food conditioned and caution against management actions based on limited observations of bear behavior.