Topic: Brown bears

Accurate identification of individual animals, known as animal re-identification (ReID), is crucial for long-term monitoring of behavior. Temporal tracking can only work well if animals are never occluded or never occlude each other. Thus, tools like DeepLabCut have built in methods for ReID (Lauer et al. Nature Methods 2022). For non-patterned species, such as mice, gorillas and fruit flies, ReID is particularly challenging due to the lack of salient body markings across individuals. Here we focus on one of the most difficult species: Brown bears (Ursus arctos). ReIDing this species is partic