Political legacies shape bear use of anthropogenic spaces

Romania hosts Europe’s largest brown bear population west of Russia, but rising human-bear encounters and related casualties raise concerns about their drivers and future population management. Using >10,000 encounter reports (2019–2024) in a hierarchical occupancy model accounting for detection processes, we show that bear presence in human-dominated spaces is linked to food conditioning, habituation, and shaped by historical management. Bears occur more often in high wildland-urban interface areas, especially those closer to communist-era elite-hunting grounds with feeding sites. These patterns reflect a long-term legacy of 1960s population management policies interacting with environmental and behavioral processes to shape recent bear behavior. We call for management addressing ecological and social sustainability by phasing out supplemental feeding, reducing habituation through a restored landscape of fear, improving public knowledge of bear ecology, and recognizing historical legacies to promote coexistence.