Grand Teton National Park – the Bears of Jackson Hole are not only extremely important for the ecosystem. You are celebrities.
Researchers at the University of Montana (UM) have recently completed a study on how signs in the Grand Teton National Park (GTNP) can influence driver behavior in order to reduce bear vehicle collisions.
According to an article published by the UM UM NEWS-SERVICE, the UM-Absolvent Miranda Foster led an initiative last summer, in which the reactions of the drivers were examined for various shield postings and designs. Last month, the research team handed over the collected vehicle data and the signs that had the greatest influence on the driver behavior of GTNP.
“We gave you the final designs, so it's a gift for you if you want to use them” Hinge. “These are signs we know. I think the staff of the Grand Teton National Park appreciates it.”
Foster completed a similar study on Togwotee Pass last summer and recently published the results as the main author. According to News Service, she hopes to publish the GTNP study later this summer.
Jeremy Shellhorn, Professor of Design at the University of Kansas, known for his work, and Pam Murcia, a field service technician, known for Foster and Rice. Foster, a native of Missoula, is a doctoral student in parks, tourism and leisure management, which also has an art background. Rice described Foster's skills and education in both science and art disciplines as the ideal for the management of the study.
Through a multi-year cooperation to investigate the biological diversity in the Greater Yellowstone-ecosystem (GYE), the Jackson Fork Ranch in Bondurant ensured the UM team to design a boat-on-down experiment in a well-known grizzly bear corridor in GTNP.
Armed with a large-formatic printer, the team spent on stage from May 2024 weeks, hung up signs every day, outlined new designs and measures the vehicle speeds at various points in the 2.3-mile corridor. Your goal: to find out which messages and designs encourage drivers to slower.
“We had the feeling that we were able to reduce the number of people who raced through the Grizzly corridor, but we put the hypothesis that the most effective signs are signs that they were not as illustrated,” said Rice. “When data occurred, we saw that some of the characters with further illustrations – a holistic component – were most effective.”
Rice said that interest in reducing animal vehicle collisions is not new. Last summer, author Ben Goldfarb accidentally published a book entitled “Crossssings: How Road Ecology Forcing the future of our planet”. When Grizzly Bear was hit by a car in October 399, according to GTNP data, it was the 51st grizzly death since 2009 due to a vehicle collision.
“In one side of the street you only have a few seconds to accept a message, and the investigations show that visual indications really help that message has a message stick in a short time,” Foster told the news service.
According to Rice, the research team experimented with different color combinations and text illustration conditions. They optimized designs every day on their campsite, printed new signs in the field and polished the data collected by their two vehicle classifiers.
One of the most effective signs of the study was the design “Sad Bear”, which reduced the probability of a driver by 35%at the beginning of the corridor. Ruthless drivers who drive over the speed limit at least 15 miles per hour were most influenced by the Cub Crossing sign that this behavior reduced in four to seven people every day.
“Cutting speed is difficult behavior,” said Rice. “But after the first one and a half weeks we found that we could make a major change than expected.”