GrizzTracker was developed in partnership with Peace Region's Operations Division staff, Alberta Environment and Parks (AEP) in collaboration with industrial stakeholders (Mercer, Boucher Bro Lumber Ltd., Canfor, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Manning Diversified Forest Products), Alberta Conservation Association and the Miistakis Institute to enable industrial personal working in the Lower Peace Region to collect sightings information on grizzly bears. The collaborative efforts of all parties to mobilize this work is truly a success in itself!

This program formalized existing efforts by Industrial personal to report grizzly bear sightings to Peace Region AEP staff. Past reporting efforts have assisted AEP in better understanding grizzly bear presence and helped to inform the locations of hair snag monitoring sites, used to identify individual grizzly bears through genetic analysis of individual hair samples.

GrizzTracker includes the development of a smartphone app and associated on-line mapping tool to increase efficiency, accuracy and ease of data collection, and ultimately generate a dataset to be used to inform grizzly bear management.

How to participate?

Online Mapping Tool

You can report bear sightings using the online mapping tool.

Smartphone App

The GrizzTracker App is available on Google Play for Android devices and the App Store for iOS devices. You can find them by searching for "Grizztracker". You will be asked to create a registration and password. Please use your "First.Lastname" as a login name and a password not easily forgotten. Any updates to the app and important alerts will be sent to the email provided.

A few things to remember about using the smartphone application:

• You only need to register once on the app, and can use the same registration on both mapping tool and smartphone app.
• The app relies on the GPS in your smartphone to record location, so this feature must be turned on, along with other permissions the app requests.
• You do NOT need internet access to record an observation or trip, data is stored on your smartphone and then uploaded once you are in a service area.
• Your app needs to be open for data to upload, so remember to keep it open once you're in a service area.
• A full walk through and training guide for GrizzTracker can be viewed here.

At this time, GrizzTracker is only interested in sightings of grizzly bears. To learn more about the difference between a black bear and grizzly bear visit the How to ID a Grizzly Bear section of the website.