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Greater Yellowstone Initiative
KEYWORDS
ecosystem science, human impacts, wildlife, National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, GIS, information transfer, landscape, mapping, methods development, modeling, ecosystems, landscape ecology, biogeography, wildlife, mapping, hydrology, geology
GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION
Montana, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, Idaho
Project Description
The Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) encompasses about 18 million acres and includes adjacent headwaters of the Columbia and Missouri Rivers in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. At its geographic core lie two of the nation's most prominent national parks, Yellowstone and Grand Teton. Public lands surrounding these parks include six national forests, two national wildlife refuges, and lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management and Native American tribes. These borderlands are interspersed with private agricultural lands, towns, and various other holdings. This complex of public and private lands offers amenities that attract people to the region in increasing numbers; clean air and water, abundant wildlife, scenic vistas, and rural settings are, in fact, attracting people at a rate that places the region among the five fastest growing areas in the nation. The natural resources of this area are beginning to be adversely impacted by unplanned residential growth, commercial development, and recreational activities. Of immediate concern are the unique thermal resources of the central plateau, quality of headwater streams and lakes, integrity of regional wildlife populations, and fragmentation of formerly continuous biological communities. Management solutions to these concerns will require a careful balance to maintain ecological integrity while allowing for continued growth and a good quality of life. Land management proceeds most effectively when there is a clear and common understanding of the underlying resource. A foundation of credible knowledge about the landscape and it component parts is, therefore, needed to provide a shared basis for planning and decision making. Some of the requisite information is currently available for the GYA, but requires identification, processing, archiving, interpretation, and synthesis to be useful for regional-level planning; some important gaps will require identification and implementation of new projects to fill information needs. This project will provide a basis for collating a shared information base, analyzing resource status and trends, predicting impacts of human activities and providing decision support tools for resource managers. Initially, work will address six major objectives, with an emphasis on developing decision support for management issues related to wildlife- human interactions in the GYA:
1. Collate existing telemetry data for large mammals and their predators.
2. Identify and fill high priority spatial data gaps required for understanding large mammal habitat use patterns.
3. Map and model habitat use patterns of the large mammal community.
4. Map and model patterns of human activity with emphases on transportation systems, residential and commercial development, agriculture, and recreation.
5. Evaluate and compare patterns of interactions among the large-mammal and human communities.
6. Identify areas of ecological sensitivity, develop management option scenarios, and provide an information framework for decision analysis and adaptive management.
Principal Investigator(s)
Douglas Ouren
Kimberly Keating
Don Despain
Peter Gogan
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