Down the Road and Up the Hill in Yellowstone: A New Initiative

It’s been a 31-year journey for us, yet only a blink in time compared to life on planet Earth. It’s time to look ahead by reflecting on what we’ve learned so that we can better adapt to sustain and restore the planet’s ecoregions, ecosystems, and watersheds. And that’s one reason why we chose to focus our efforts on one of the most pristine ecosystems on Earth—Yellowstone National Park (YNP) and the surrounding Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE). This unparalleled ‘laboratory’ has set many new conservation policies in the US allowing species restoration and has kept numerous species from going extinct. Nearly every major conservation controversy has played itself out on its 22-million acre stage. As such, we have specifically taken advantage of these natural and policy experiments such as the great fires of 1988, the wolf reintroduction in 1995-96, the 100-year drought of 2001-05, bark beetle and blister rust outbreaks, the rise of bison and the fall of elk populations, and the great flood of 2022. During that time we also contributed to the advancement and implementation of using spaceborne, airborne, and ground-based sensor systems to advance ecological forecasting to prevent damage, promote successful planning, and improve human-wildlife coexistence strategies. In total, we obtained funding for over 100 major research projects that have helped pave the road ahead for conservation science focused on solutions.

Amongst the hard work of conservation organizations, we collectively need to take a hard look at our organizational successes versus the successes for biodiversity. It saddens us to realize we win some battles but we are losing the war—big time. Biodiversity is still in jeopardy as species populations and their habitats continue to decline. Remember that at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch—the start of civilization and agriculture—an estimated 99% of the biomass of all the 5,400+ land mammals on Earth were wild species. Since then, that level has dropped to less than 4% as humans and their domestic species dominate 96% of the planet’s land surface with large mammals being the primary target through by habitat loss and removal (killing). Their catastrophic declines have had an inordinately large negative impact on ecosystem stability and resilience through destabilizing cascading trophic interactions. However, these impacts also tell us that the best way to restore ecosystems back to a healthy, resilient state: restore large mammals at the top-of-the-food-chain as well as the habitats that sustain them. So what can we do to actually reverse the current downward spiral of degraded ecosystems using the GYE that, by all standards of comparison, is quite healthy?

In response, we took a road-less-traveled in 1993 and built a small independent NGO dedicated to research and education specializing in conservation solutions at the scale of the problem. Because today’s environmental problems occur as large-scale impacts over long time periods (e.g., climate, pollution, disturbance, disease, habitat loss), we tailored our programs to understand how ecosystems, and the species populations that inhabit them, respond to these impacts—including the impact of human land-use activities and policy experiments. We initiate many long-term and large-scale studies because the most impacted species have long generation times; up to 30 years for our large mammals, and up to a 1,000 years for plants. After all, what lessons can you really learn about a 10,000 year-old stream from a short-term study? Yet today as in the past, research and education projects are still short-term (average 2 years) and occur at the small plot scale (a few meters). So looking down the road, we see an uphill battle that is attainable if we take an ecocentric view and fully understand how dynamic ecosystems respond to human and climate impacts and apply that knowledge to solve problems. Our new concept, called “adaptive ecology,” was adopted 10 years ago. It was suggested to us by the late Michael Soule—considered the father of Conservation Biology—after he attended two YERC-sponsored workshops (one in YNP). It re-directed our programs in two ways: by (1) embracing adaptive learning from our ecosystem-scale projects to guide decision-making annually, and (2) applying this learning so that humans can adapt and reverse the trends of habitat loss and population declines, especially large mammals.

In addition to our founding pillars of (1) long-term, and (2) large-scale studies as adaptive learning experiments, is (3) collaborative partnerships. We have been rethinking how to craft a combined version of these called community science cooperatives and started several over the past six years (RiverNET, WildNET, and LandNET). Based on these new programs and from experiences along the way since 1993, the greatest lesson learned is an impediment called out by the late E.O. Wilson as the greatest threat to life on Earth: human tribalism. It is a problem of cognitive dissonance because the goal of conservation NGOs at local, regional, and national scale is to save or protect species and their habitats. Collectively they seek human coexistence with Nature, yet species and their habitats (biodiversity) are in decline while most ecosystems—Yellowstone as an exception—are being degraded. So how can we achieve coexistence between humans and wild species if we can’t coexist amongst ourselves?  How can we rethink how to actually work together by creating a new tribalism in a way that faces head-on our biggest challenge: how to restore large mammal populations and provide stronghold habitat (“The Bison in the Living Room”) and make our ecosystems resilient and healthy for future generations of all species? And is there any better place to build a model for this than in the GYE? And we all know that loss of habitat and overharvest are, by far, the two leading causes of the catastrophic declines described above. We also know that the two species groups of greatest decline—carnivores and ungulates—are the key to restoring healthy, resilient ecosystems if we provide them large landscape expanses of safe, stronghold habitat. How will we accomplish this? And we are not the only ones that see this problem and its solution. Seeking common ground is a great place to start. In fact, the modern conservation movement began with Teddy Roosevelt, a conservative Republican that conserved. We believe it’s time to bring his conservationism into the 21st century.

These goals are also central to E.O. Wilson’s Half-Earth biodiversity initiative and President Biden’s version called the 30x30 vision to Conserve Nature that seeks to expand protected area status to 30%. It also acknowledges that it is unlikely to expand designated protected lands (wilderness areas, national parks, wildlife refuges) from the current amount of 14% of terrestrial land to 30% by 2030. Because agricultural expansion is the main driver of centuries-long human propensity but also biodiversity decline, why shouldn’t agricultural lands be a central focus of science-based restoration efforts? Indeed the Biden administration invited private landowners like farmers and ranchers to get involved, promising to maintain ranching in the West “as an important and proud way of life.” Their report also acknowledged the conservation movement’s discriminatory past, including its appropriation of Native American ancestral land and neglect of communities of color, and it vowed to work toward a more inclusive future. So if we need a new tribalism to do this, what must we then do?

YERC recently conducted a workshop (hosted by the Common Ground Project) of thought leaders and undertook surveys of private landowners to begin the planning and design phase needed to launch our new initiative called the Northern Yellowstone Partnership (NYP)—a new tribalism of collaboration to restore ecosystems - both private and public lands. It takes advantage of the large region north of Yellowstone, a region rich in biodiversity and is a vignette of the semi-arid bioregion of the US West. The uniting theme that we aspire to is:

“What scientists and practitioners do should go hand-in-hand because they both measure success by the ability to predict the consequences of their actions.”

And who better to lead this community science learning effort than private landowners that know their land? Thus, the Northern Yellowstone Partnership (NYP) seeks to apply science—defined as anything that contributes new knowledge—to restore rangelands because, unlike the intensive agriculture common with farming domestic crops, ranchlands managed for livestock grazing have great potential to sustain high levels of biodiversity because they provide large expanses of potentially restorable native habitats, and they often  include, or are adjacent to, source populations of large mammal species on public lands. Thus, the key to ecosystem health beneficial to humans—resiliency,  connectivity, and trophic rebalancing of ecosystems—is to restore large mammals and their habitats on private lands (including sustainable practices on public lands). To do this, we also need to apply ecological and social science to achieve these goals by: (1) incentivizing landowners hearts, minds, and pocketbooks by promoting, for example, regenerative agriculture and coexistence practices on rangelands which in turn can increase soil and plant health, resilience, production, increase in biodiversity, and human profit, and (2) involving landowners as practitioner scientists they are (like doctors of land health) to lead an adaptive learning environment, testing and improving both the latest technologies and tried and true traditional practices. Thus, the NYP is a community science co-op that ‘learns by doing’ and collaborates with other like-minded stakeholder groups (academia, agencies, NGOs, businesses/corporations, Native American nations, and private landowners). A key additional feature is that it’s a partnership and does not create yet another NGO that competes for membership and funding sources. Another key feature of the NYP is building trust which is best done with the truth which is the ultimate purpose of both science and justice.

Northern Yellowstone is the perfect setting for this new initiative where more-pristine federal lands provide source populations of large mammals migrating and dispersing to a vast expanse of lower elevation private lands (and some public lands) outside the boundaries of YNP.  With strategic planning, we hope that producers will ‘early-adopt’ and ‘self-test’ regenerative agricultural practices and coexistence technologies that are incentivized with increased profit margins and/or co-payments. Initially, we have four organizations interested in becoming founding NYP founding partner organizations that each provide complementary skills, expertise, and services needed. Overall, this will provide an extraordinary opportunity to further bridge the gap between scientists and practitioners to better society through the promotion of ecosystem services, restoration of ecosystem assets, and the creation of a new tribalism for conservation success.

— Dr. Robert Crabtree, Chief Scientist

In 2023 YERC received a grant from the Rangeland Foundation to plan and design the NYP. So stay tuned in 2024 and PLEASE REACH OUT to us if you are interested in being involved and truly collaborating.