Records of Ursus arctos within the territory of Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine, during 2003-2025

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 59 records.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Gashchak S, Korepanova K, Kudrenko S, Vyshnevskiy D, Varukha A (2025). Records of Ursus arctos within the territory of Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine, during 2003-2025. Version 1.1. Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve. Occurrence dataset. https://ukraine.ipt.gbif.no/resource?r=chrebr_bear_2025&v=1.1

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 8371236e-b785-4c10-b11b-5c2ec3c48e17.  Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Participant Node Managers Committee.

Keywords

Occurrence; Observation

Contacts

Geographic Coverage

Europe, Ukraine, Ukrainian (Kyiv) Polissia, North of Kyiv region, territory of Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.

Taxonomic Coverage

Kingdom – Animalia. Phylum – Chordata. Class – Mammalia. Order – Carnivora. Family – Ursidae (Genus: Ursus). In total 1 species: Ursus arctos (Linnaeus, 1758).

Temporal Coverage

Project Data

No Description available

The personnel involved in the project:

Sampling Methods

Brown bear observations, reported here, were obtained via 1. Camera trapping. Camera traps were deployed by Sergii Gashchak as a part of routine monitoring (2003-2021) and as a part of the following monitoring and conservation projects: “Chernobyl – a Radioactive Ecosystem on Fire” project (CHAR, 2021), UNEP-Global Environment Facility (GEF) project “Conserving, Enhancing and Managing Carbon Stock and Biodiversity in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone” project (NatEnvPr, 2014-2021), and international “TRansfer-Exposure-Effects” camera trap monitoring project (TREE, 2015); and by researchers from the Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve for routine monitoring of mammals (2021-2025). 2. Human observations of bears and signs of bear presence such as tracks, scats, hair and scratches on marking trees. Observations were reported by Sergii Gashchak and researchers from the Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve (2021-2025). Observations were carried out in different seasons and weather conditions.

Method step description:

1. Collection of brown bear observations using camera traps.
2. Collection of brown bear observations (human observations of animals) and observations of their presence (animals, scats, tracks, or scratches on marking trees).
3. Preparing a dataset with brown bear observations

Bibliographic Citations

1. Gashchak, S. P., Gulyaichenko, Y. O., Beresford, N. A., Wood, M. D. Brown bear (Ursus arctos L.) in Chernobyl exclusion zone // Proceeedings of Theriological School. - Vol 14 (2016): 71-84. http://doi.org/10.15407/ptt2016.14.071
2. Gashchak, S. 2024. Annotated review of the mammal fauna in the Chornobyl Biosphere Reserve as of 2023. Theriologia Ukrainica, 28: 3-33. [In English, with Ukrainian summary] http://doi.org/10.53452/TU2803

Additional Metadata