Grizzly bears are an iconic symbol of wilderness, ecological integrity and of healthy, thriving
landscapes across western North America.
Grizzlies once roamed over a massive territory spreading
over half the US up into Canada, and down into Mexico.
But between 1850 and 1920, the bears were hunted down to 95% of their original range.
But now, a conservation initiative is succeeding in bringing those numbers back.
Some species are needier than others when it comes to survival.
More than just the basics; food, water and shelter.
They need wide ranges to roam a vast diversity of things to eat, and even specific weather
patterns to follow.
So, it makes sense that when the neediest species are doing well, the ecosystem benefits as
a whole.
Grizzly bears are a perfect example.
If they're thriving in an area, that's a sign that lots
of other species are thriving too.
Their numbers have rebounded a bit since being added to
the endangered species list in 1975.
But the population remains fragmented in areas where the bears can no longer move or mix
with each other.
Grizzly populations get fragmented, because people like us like to live, recreate, and
develop in the places that grizzly bears also use.
That's a real problem, and the things that we do like building those roads and putting
them in places that animals need create real problems for these wildlife populations, all
of that adds up and makes it really hard to coexist with big toothy carnivores like
grizzly bears.
That's where the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative comes in.
They're one of the groups working to relink these isolated populations from Yellowstone
National Park in Wyoming to the Yukon in northern Canada.
In doing so, they're restoring habitats, not just for grizzlies, but also for many other
species.
One of the reasons we need grizzly bears in a landscape is because they are something
called an umbrella species.
And that means, if you can keep grizzly bears in this landscape, you will inadvertently
keep up to 16 other large and medium-sized mammals.
Others foxes, coyotes, lynx, wolves.
And it's not just other predators that are under the grizzly umbrella.
It's also prey animals like big horn sheep and deer, and even flora like white bark
pine trees.
We need a way of saying, this is the species we're gonna focus on most, not exclusively, but
a lot of our efforts focus on grizzly bears, because they are so important as this umbrella systems
for the system.
Grizzlies are an ideal umbrella because they live in such diverse places throughout
their lives.
They use places like this river valley.
They use the high alpine areas, and all forest in between.
In its lifetime, a single bear may cover a home range as largest 3,883 square kilometers.
So because they move over such big areas and they need a diversity of habitat.
Every year, and for their whole life, they're going to cover lots of the same areas that
other animals live.
Finding these giant spaces for grizzly bears to move seems like a Herculean mission, and
that's where the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative comes in.
They're a group of conservationists
and scientists working to restore land all the way from Yellowstone to Yukon.
When I was doing my undergraduate degree in biology, about 20 years ago.
I remember learning about this big, bold plan that some conservationists and scientists
and people who cared about the Rocky Mountains had, and they wanted to connect and protect
all this habitat from Yellowstone to Yukon, and I just thought I thought two things.
One, that's amazing.
And two, that's crazy it's never gonna work.
The crazy thing though is that the plan
is working, and the evidence is in the maps.
We are looking for these critical linkages that are either fractured or broken, and we
want to try to fix them.
So that animals can keep moving throughout there.
In the end, the goal is to be fully connected, so that the bears in southern Wyoming
meet the bears in northern Canada before their individual populations get too small.
For healthy populations, we need to have movement, you need movements of animals so that they
can find mates, so that they can breed, and we can have genetic diversity.
The alternative is that they'll be inbred, and will get smaller and smaller populations
that aren't gonna be able to withstand problems that come in the future.
It's not just genetic problems that face grizzly populations where they become fragmented.
It also means that the bears are coming in contact with more roads and cars, or that
they're forced to enter into areas with humans as changing temperatures and extreme weather
events due to climate change continued to occur plant communities and wildlife will
move in search of more favorable climates ecologists believe that the grizzlies are
sure to follow.
Animals need to move normally they need to move even more under climate change.
So we need to allow populations to be moving from sometimes from the south to the north,
so that they can find the cool habitats and they're adapted to.
It doesn't always take a giant reserved area like Banff National Park to serve as a wild
space for animals.
There are all kinds of wildlife corridors because there's all kinds of wildlife.
In fact, the valley that we're in right now is an example of a wildlife corridor.
So you've got this river behind me here and going out onto the floodplains that's going
to be an area that is naturally easier for animals to move in, but then we get smaller
ones too, like the wildlife overpasses that's in an area along the highway that's been fenced
to keep animals off the highway to keep people safe and we drive on it.
Once Y2Y helps create a new wildlife corridor.
They'll carefully track how the grizzly bears and other species respond and whether they
actually use the new space.
The research that's happening inside this national park on on grizzly bears and other wildlife
is super cool.
This all helps us to learn more about what animals need in places like this, and
how we can live better with them, so that could include hair snagging to tell us about
the genetics.
It can include wildlife cameras that show where they go in and what's their behavior,
and how do people effect that?
The latest studies show that the estranged populations of bears
in the south and north are the closest to each other, they've been in more than 100
years.
Not only are the Yellowstone girzzlies moving north, but the northern Grizzlies are moving
south via the new wildlife corridors.
If we don't let them move in their natural corridors or we don't restore the broken corridors.
They will die.
We will have populations that continue to get smaller and smaller, more and more isolated
until they're gone.
We think a lot about climate change, and the work that we do to connect landscapes, is
one of the critical things we can do to adapt to climate change.
There are so many things that individuals can do to help with conservation that ranges
from you could spend your whole life doing this kind of work, or you can show up and help
count bumblebees and plant trees.