About – Bear Bones

Bear Bones is a Non-Profit Civil Society for the protection of nature in the Mt. Voras region, North Greece.

It is a conservation and wildlife initiative focused on co-existing with local wildlife, particularly brown bears. We organise and facilitate research expeditions, field research projects and seasonal surveys. Through our collaborations with groups like the Callisto Wildlife and Nature Conservation Society we work on larger conservation projects, like setting up electric fencing that protects local produce from bear damages and keeps bears and people safe.

Bear Bones houses a small field research centre and runs alongside our local cooperative, The Children’s Orchard, a collection of traditional crafts workshops, with a small local youth centre at its heart. When you join our projects, we welcome you to the mountain, our research, our workshops and the youth centre.

Summer internships, student placements, dissertation data collection, and research projects are all welcome. You will be working alongside Dr Angeliki Savvantoglou from Bear Bones, as the lead researcher, local guide, and supervisor. Bear Bones can facilitate research projects around ecology, wildlife conservation, environmental science, social science, and citizen science and outreach. We would love for you to run a project you are very passionate about and use your free time to rest, research or join our workshops and help the youth centre while learning some new skills.

You can explore our projects, research placements and internships in the brochure below.

Our non-profit is also well-known for our artistic and handmade approach to sustainability and science communication.

We create our one-of-a-kind merch, with our favourite being Angeliki’s hand-carved lino-print stamps applied to second-hand clothing found in local markets.

You can check out our wildlife projects and sustainable merch drops directly on our @bearbonesnp Instagram profile!

Hi! This is Angeliki – the person behind Bear Bones. I come from a small village called Panagitsa, where my love for the mountains – especially Mt. Voras – was cultivated. This lead me to The University of the West of England (UWE) and the Conservation Biology course, and to a placement year back to my Greek mountains, tracking bears.

Bears stole my heart – and science brain – so I continued onto a PhD at UWE, studying my home bears in a country where there are no bears! Alongside my PhD research, I worked as a GIS technical instructor.

I have a strong background in GIS analysis, especially habitat suitability modelling techniques, field monitoring (mammal tracking, camera trapping, small mammal trapping, etc), and genetic monitoring (eDNA and iDNA), both in field sample collection, and lab analysis and interpretation.

I always found science incredibly fascinating and at the same time hard to access and tangled in impossibly complicated concepts. Through the years, I’ve learned how to use art to understand and simplify the things I was trying to get my head around. Bear Bones was born from the experience I gathered working in higher education and research, combined with my passion for applied conservation, especially when it comes to coexisting with large carnivores.

It was created with the aim to connect people with science and nature, both by communicating research in more accessible ways and by providing people physical access it, through citizen science projects, placements and research facilitation.

With a strong background in illustration and graphic design, one of my favourite things is looking for innovative and creative ways to communicate complex scientific messages. I am now using my academic skills and illustration skills to do exactly that for field guides, educational material, scientific figures, infographics, nature-inspired tattoo designs and many other exciting projects.