For more than a century,
National Park has been an icon of American conservation. But survival of the 2.2 million-acre park—and the plants and animals that live there—depends on what happens in an even larger landscape: the 27 million-acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE).
In recent years, land use changes and loss of open space resulting from residential development, energy exploration, and transportation infrastructure have increasingly affected wildlife movement in the region. The Greater Yellowstone mammal migration partnership aims to develop a conservation approach that will result in the protection of wildlife movement patterns while addressing the needs of the human community. This work will be successful only through the collaboration of many regional constituencies—from federal, state and county governments, to conservation organizations, to family ranchers, to landowners and visitors to the region.
Goals of the partnership include:
Examples of Key PartnersThe Nature Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee, federal land management agencies, state game and fish agencies, state departments of transportation, local land trusts, communities, and private landowners.
Results and Accomplishments
Strategy, collaboration and good science blend to form the basis of the partnership's efforts. Guided by natural delineation rather than politically-created boundaries, the partnership is developing solutions that ensure one of the ecosystem's natural processes—mammal migrations—remain intact and thrive. Several key accomplishments have been achieved that will lay the foundation for the partnership's ongoing work:
- Conducted two meetings, with a total of 50 participants from around the ecosystem, to begin assessing migration data, significance of specific corridors, viability of migrations and opportunities for conservation collaboration.
- Passage of the $15 million Wyoming Wild Trust Fund to protect and enhance wildlife and wildlife habitat.
- 41,957 acres of private land protected through conservation easements and acquisitions to preserve migration and seasonal ranges around the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
- The Nature Conservancy developed three related science prioritizations for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem over the past five years. The most recent, completed in 2005, used migration data to identify the highest priority areas for conservation, which represented 4% of the ecosystem. This data is available for state and federal planning purposes and conservation strategy development.
- Formation of a working group including NGOs, and state and federal agencies to create recommendations for the Bureau of Land Management regarding Trapper’s Point, an antelope migration bottleneck in
Wyoming, which due to subdivisions is now less than a third of a mile wide.
- Development of a conservation strategy that draws upon the interests, expertise and resources from NGOs, federal land management agencies, state departments of transportation and private individuals to address the challenge of keeping migration corridors intact across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
- Conveying the ecological importance of migration to local citizens, state governments and others who can help reverse the loss of elk, bison, wolves, and antelope and other icons of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.