Artificial intelligence has been helping consumers purchase goods through the internet, direct traffic flow, and automate office environments for many years. Now, it is providing assistance to residents in Japan to avoid encounters with bears.
With the added use of more sophisticated technology due to the alarming rise of bear attacks in Japan, several municipal governments are trying to implement faster methods for protecting its citizens from bear attacks, especially near rural areas where people are living on the edge of forests or wildlife.
Interestingly, these methods do not include putting up larger fences around wildlife areas or putting together larger patrols to monitor them. Instead, municipalities are beginning to utilize total AI-based monitoring systems and advanced drone systems that will allow them to locate bears long before they create problems.
The reason for this urgency is obvious. 2025 had Japan’s highest number of bear-related incidents resulting in injuries and fatalities. The bear attack trend has continued well into 2026 with further reports of fatalities resulting from bear attacks in multiple areas throughout Japan.
One community taking action is Showa Village in Fukushima Prefecture. The growth in bear activity in and around the village (an increase of bears in residential areas) has been dramatic. Local officials normally catch approximately 30 bears that come near population centers each year; however, numbers have increased to approximately three times the normal number, raising serious concerns about the safety of residents.
To address this issue, village officials are looking into an artificial intelligence-based image analysis system that has been developed by a Japanese technology firm (for commercial release). The concept is simple yet powerful. Automated monitoring cameras continuously take pictures whenever motion is detected, and the artificial intelligence analyzes each image in real-time as it is recorded.
If the system detects a bear, it will immediately send an alert to local law enforcement, emergency services, and other governmental agencies. By providing almost instant notification to communities, as opposed to waiting for human observation, communities will be able to respond to incidents of bear activity much more quickly.
What makes this technology particularly impressive, according to developers, is that the system can identify bears with an accuracy of almost 100%.
Rural Areas Will Experience Much More than Just the Basic Benefits of Detecting Wildlife. The Traditional Method of Wildlife Monitoring is to Physically Patrol the Area Where Wildlife May Be Present, and this Requires a High Degree of Manpower with Many Man-Hours Dedicated to the Patrolling of the Area. By Utilizing AI Surveillance in an Area, You Are Able to Reduce the Demand for Patrolling and Increase the Availability of Continuous Monitoring Commissioning Resources to Track the Wildlife Behaviors of Animals Along Critical Boundary Areas Where the Activities of Wildlife and Humans Overlap.
In Hokkaido, There is a New Technology That is Being Tested in Shintotsukawa; Drones Are Used for Monitoring Wildlife and are Part of the Community’s Wildlife Management Strategy. If a Reported Bear is in the Area, Drones Can Be Launched in Minutes to Search for the Animal Rather than Wait Until Manpower Has Arrived to Conduct a Ground Search for the Bear.
Drones Are Able to Track the Movement of Wildlife Providing Live Data Until Wildlife Officers or Hunters Can Get to the Area. This Service Has Proven to Be Very Helpful in Circumstances When the Bear Moves Across the Territory Quickly (Such as Large Amounts of Territory). Drones Utilize Thermal Imaging Cameras to Allow for the Detection of Heat Signatures of Wildlife; this Feature Provides Wildlife Management Very Jagged Edges When Compared to Conducting Traditional Visual Searches.
Local Governments Are Not Only Concerned About Immediate Public Safety; They View These Technologies as an Overall Problem Facing Rural Japan. The Decline in Rural Japanese Communities Makes It Difficult to Keep Up with Infrastructure and Public Services and Will Require Fewer Job Opportunities Which Will Ultimately Create a Population Decline.
There are pragmatic solutions available to fill the identified voids—namely, utilizing automated and intelligent monitoring systems. By leveraging AI, remote sensing technologies (i.e., the ability to gather data from a distance), and drone usage, authorities can continue to protect their residents and mitigate operational costs.
Bears moving further into human communities emphasizes how closely the lines are drawn to connect human communities and wildlife habitat areas. Because bears are often found closer than expected to rural towns and suburbs, the traditional methods of managing risk associated with bear populations will require a transformation as bears continue to appear more frequently in human communities.
Japan’s project to assess wildlife using AI systems, enabling the detection of wildlife as well as the use of rapid response drones to enable quick and effective responses to bear human encounters, could become a best practice model for other nations experiencing a similar increase in the encounters of bears and humans. What originally started as an alternative to meeting a growing public safety issue, has the potential to revolutionize how communities throughout the world monitor and coexist together with wildlife.
In an age where technology has drastically changed how we perceive and interact with the world around us, potentially, a person who unexpectedly comes across a wild bear could find themselves assisted through artificial intelligence, thermal imaging, and a drone arriving above them in less than 10 minutes.
