The bear Ema mostly keeps to the Slovak side of Javorniky
20. 8. 2019 - Martina Dušková
The female bear named Ema has spent the first three months since April when she has been fitted with a GPS collar in the mountains on the Czech-Slovak border. At the moment, Ema´s location signal comes from the Slovak part of the Javorníky Mountains where she stays most of the time. However, the total area over which she has travelled since the beginning of telemetric monitoring covers over 1,300 square kilometres.
Based on the GPS locations, the researchers discovered that she primarily keeps to the forest environment (93 % of the location data). Other favoured habitats include meadows and pastures, and agricultural areas with natural vegetation. On several occasions during the mating season, Ema was caught by a camera trap in the company of a male bear. She has damaged several unprotected beehives but no further damaged occurred since the beginning of June.
The bear monitoring project is a cooperation of the Beskydy Protected Landscape Area Administration, Mendel University in Brno, Friends of the Earth Czech Republic (Hnutí DUHA Olomouc), and the Polish Tatra National Park and Institute of Nature Conservation. The Tatra National Park provided a telemetric collar used for the monitoring. The female bear was captured and radio-collared on 8 April near Lysá hora, the highest peak of the Moravian-Silesian Beskydy. The animal was given name Ema which, according to the Czech calendar, is associated with the day of her capture.