LiDAR in Wildlife: Scanning Bears for Fat Bear Week

“Fat Bear Week celebrates fatness. That’s what you want to do before you go into your den.” Each year as summer begins to fade and wildlife begins to prepare for the long Alaskan winter, Katmai National Park holds an annual voting contest known as Fat Bear Week, in which the general public votes on their favorite fat bear of the season, with contests for both junior and adult brown bears. The event has gained mass popularity online over the last few years, with nearly 800,000 votes being cast in the 2021 contest. The junior edition of this year’s contest begins on September 29, with the adult side beginning their voting on October 5. The bracket-style tournament is a celebration of the Alaskan ecosystem and these bears successfully preparing for their winter hibernation. Read on to learn how the National Parks Service in Alaska explains how to scan a bear.

From an article in Geo Week News by Matt Collins.

Given that this contest is run via vote, it’s not about who is literally the fattest, or heaviest, bear, but weight is still a big part of the equation for many. Of course, it’s much easier said than done to get a precise weight for these bears. Park officials are able to get an estimate in most years, though, and that’s thanks to the implementation of laser scanners to create estimates. Joel Cusick, a GIS Specialist in the Alaskan Regional Office for the National Parks Service, was the catalyst for this technology being used in the contest, and he was kind enough to spend some time with Geo Week News to talk about how it’s being used, and what doors it could open for wildlife monitoring beyond the fun of Fat Bear Week.

Cusick has plenty of familiarity around many different types of technology, and while making sure to note he is an “ologist,” and not a surveyor, he had used Trimble laser scanners for capturing facilities and other infrastructure around parks. In 2018, he had the idea of trying to scan bears in the park, and that’s how the idea for using this as part of Fat Bear Week originated. He and his team started using a Trimble TX8 scanner for the contest in 2019, and while they were unable to complete scans for this year’s contest for a myriad of reasons, Cusick hopes and expects to utilize it again for future contests. As we’ll discuss below, there are a number of other potential benefits from using lidar scanners for bears.

How to scan a bear

Generally speaking, laser scanners of all kinds are used on inanimate, stationary items, whether they be buildings, bridges, worksite stockpiles, or any of the other many objects we see scanned in this space. That’s a much different, and frankly simpler, task than scanning a living creature, especially one with the capacity to do serious damage. Fortunately, Cusick and his team found a safe way – for both the humans and bears – to complete this process, setting up their scanner on a platform along the Brooks River, home to one of the densest populations of bears on Earth, close enough to complete the scans but far enough away to remain out of harm’s way.

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