Streaming link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZVMVlkbTRk

Doors open at 6:30pm for a community social with beer and wine available for purchase. The presentation will start at 7:00pm.

Grizzly bears roamed the North Cascades region for thousands of years as a key part of the ecosystem. They distributed native plant seeds and kept other wildlife populations in balance. Since then, populations declined primarily due to direct killing by humans. The last confirmed sighting of a grizzly bear in the U.S. portion of the North Cascades ecosystem was in 1996. In April 2024, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) decided that restoring grizzly bears to the North Cascades ecosystem (NCE) would be undertaken by relocating grizzly bears from other ecosystems. USFWS designated North Cascades grizzly bears as a nonessential experimental population under section 10(j) of the Endangered Species Act. This designation provides authorities and land managers with additional tools for management that would not otherwise be available under existing Endangered Species Act regulations. National Park Service Wildlife Biologist Dr. Jason Ransom will discuss the ecology of grizzly bears in the NCE, what the restoration process looks like moving forward, and best practices for coexisting with both black bears and grizzly bears in the Cascades.

About the presenter:

Dr. Jason Ransom (he/him) is a National Park Service Wildlife Biologist, and the Wildlife Program Lead for North Cascades National Park Service Complex. He is the NPS project lead for grizzly bear restoration in the North Cascades and the project lead on Pacific fisher restoration in the North and South Cascades. Currently, his other research and conservation work focuses on lynx, wolves, marmots, mountain goats, and birds in the park complex. Jason is a member of the International Union of Conservation and Nature – Species Survival Commission, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Commission North Cascades technical team, and Affiliate Faculty at Washington State University.