GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK — The bears of Jackson Hole are not only extremely vital to the ecosystem; they are celebrities.
Researchers at the University of Montana (UM) have completed a recent study on how signage in Grand Teton National Park (GTNP) can affect driver behavior, in an effort to reduce bear-vehicle collisions.
According to an article published by the UM News Service, UM graduate student Miranda Foster led an initiative last summer that studied drivers’ real-time responses to various sign postings and designs. Last month, the research team handed over the vehicle data collected and the signs that had the most effect on driver behavior to GTNP.
“We have given them the final designs, so it’s a gift to them if they want to use them,” said Will Rice, assistant professor of outdoor recreation and wildland management at UM, when he spoke with Buckrail. “These are signs we know work. I think the Grand Teton National Park staff appreciates it.”
Foster completed a similar study on Togwotee Pass last summer and recently published the results as the lead author. According to UM News Service, she hopes to publish the GTNP study later this summer.
Joining Foster and Rice on the team was Jeremy Shellhorn, a professor of design at the University of Kansas who is known for his work digitizing the national park typeface, and Pam Murcia, an undergraduate field technician. Foster, a Missoula native, is a graduate student in parks, tourism and recreation management who also has an art background. Rice credited Foster’s skill set and education in both science and art disciplines as ideal for leading the study.
Through a multiyear collaboration to study biodiversity in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), Jackson Fork Ranch in Bondurant provided funding for the UM team to design a boots-on-the-ground experiment in a known grizzly bear corridor in GTNP.
Armed with a large-format printer, the team spent weeks on the scene from May to July 2024, hanging signs every day, sketching new designs and measuring vehicle speeds at different spots in the 2.3-mile corridor. Their goal: to find out which messages and designs encouraged drivers to slow down.
“We felt that we could meaningfully reduce the amount of folks speeding through the grizzly corridor, but we hypothesized that the most effective signs would be signs that weren’t as illustrated,” said Rice. “As data came in, we saw that some of the signs with more illustrations — a holistic component — ended up being the most effective.”
Rice explained that the interest in reducing animal-vehicle collisions is not new. Last summer, coincidentally around the time of the study, author Ben Goldfarb released a book called “Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet.” When Grizzly Bear 399 was struck by a car in October, it was the 51st grizzly death as a result of a vehicular collision in the GYE since 2009, according to GTNP data.
“In a roadside setting, you only have a couple seconds to take in a message, and research shows that visual cues really help that message stick in a short amount of time,” Foster told the UM News Service.
According to Rice, the research team experimented with different color combinations and text-illustration ratios. They tweaked designs each day at their campsite, printed new signs in the field and pored over the data collected by their two vehicle classifiers.
One of the most overall effective signs of the study was the “sad bear” design, which reduced the odds of a driver speeding at the beginning of the corridor by 35%. Reckless drivers, people driving at least 15 miles per hour over the speed limit, were most influenced by the cub crossing sign, which reduced that behavior in four to seven people each day, according to Rice.
“Speeding is a tough behavior to change,” said Rice. “But after the first week and a half, we realized that we could make a bigger change than anticipated.”
