Migratory corridors for wildlife could bring more success stories/NPS, Cascades Carnivore Project
Protecting Migratory Corridors For Bottled Up Wildlife
By Kurt Repanshek
It took roughly a century, but the three wolverines cavorting in the backcountry of Mount Rainier National Park reflected the instinctual wiring and determination that guides the small carnivores to their historic habitats.
“Wolverines returning to and reproducing in their historical range is huge for wolverine conservation,” Jocelyn Akins, founder of Cascades Carnivore Project, said back in August 2021 when the photos were released and the wolverines were celebrated.
But the celebrations don't happen often enough, and when they do, it's usually over one animal's amazing journey, such as when a wolf from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem roamed nearly 900 miles to the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park in the fall of 2014. There have been other, unconfirmed, reports of Yellowstone-area wolves making it into Rocky Mountain National Park, as well as GPS tracking evidence that one of the park's wolves actually did make it close to Rocky Mountain.
But too often getting in the way of those instincts and determination are fractured landscapes, highways, and human development.
The Challenge
There is wide acceptance that we have drifted too far away from nature and that we need to pull closer. The 2022 State of the Birds report pointed out that more than half of bird species normally found in habitats as diverse as forests, deserts, and oceans in the United States are in decline. Climate change is a major factor in those declines, but human development also plays a key role by chewing into wildlife habitat and creating biological islands.
The large landscape national parks that are home to many species of wildlife have been turning into biological islands as development hems them in.
There have been efforts to reverse those trends. Since 1991, the Wildlands Network has been, as that organization puts it, striving to “reconnect, restore and rewild North America.” Two years later, in 1993, the Yellowstone to Yukon conservation initiative was launched, envisioned as a corridor stretching from Yellowstone National Park to Canada’s Yukon Territory to serve wildlife by protecting core wildlife habitat.
The Pew Charitable Trusts this past October released a report on the need for creating migratory corridors, and the challenges standing in their way.
More recently, Dr. William Newmark, a research curator and conservation biologist in the Natural History Museum of Utah, was the lead author of a report stating how increased connectivity between Yellowstone and Glacier national parks and Mount Rainier and North Cascades national parks would bolster mammalian species diversity.
Three decades earlier, in the mid-1990s, Newmark had published a paper that looked at the native mammalian species that had vanished from national parks.
Among Newmark's findings:
- Lassen Volcanic National Park in California had lost 43 percent of its once-native species.
- Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park, both in Utah, had each lost 36 percent.
- Mount Rainier National Park in Washington had lost 32 percent.
- Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and Crater Lake National Park in Oregon had each lost 31 percent.
- Yosemite National Park had lost 25 percent.
"I report here that the natural post-establishment loss of mammalian species in 14 Western North American national parks is consistent with these predictions of the land-bridge island hypothesis and that all but the largest Western North American national parks are too small to retain an intact mammalian fauna," the researcher wrote in a paper that appeared in the January 29, 1987, volume of Nature.
During a recent appearance on the Traveler's podcast series, Newmark said key to halting, and reversing, such losses is to protect migratory corridors for wildlife.
"I think we would like to believe that once a national park or protected area is established is that we have adequately conserved the species that they contain. But what island biogeography theory highlighted is that most species that go extinct, their extinctions do not occur immediately. Rather, they're delayed, and it's this delayed loss of species that actually offers us an opportunity to conserve species if we connect protected areas with corridors," he explained. "And the reason is because corridors effectively enlarge a protected area. Not only do they permit species to move between various protected areas, but they provide more habitat, and by providing more habitat you have effectively enlarged population sizes, and thus, you reduce the rate at which species disappear from habitat fragments or parks over time."
The bottom line, according to Elaine Leslie, chief of biological resources for the National Park Service when she retired at the end of 2019, is that "[C]onnectivity is a critical piece of how we're going to restore and maintain biodiversity." And, she continued on a recent Traveler podcast, it's not just land-based wildlife that need the corridors.
"Ancient pathways have been used by marine mammals and sharks and fish. We need to remember those sorts of things as well," said Leslie. "It's not just land-based ungulates that need this, and it's not just charismatic megafauna. And I think that's what Y2Y and other initiatives have exhibited, that this can work for species like grizzly bear and wolverines, and bobcat and mountain lion and the whole predator prey relationship."
But protecting migratory corridors stretching hundreds of miles or more won't easily or quickly happen. Challenges range from the federal land management agencies with different missions to state, local, and even individual landowners in the proposed corridors who might not want to grant conservation easements. And all the while there's the clock ticking on the loss of biodiversity in the world.
"From NPCA's [National Parks Conservation Association], something we are thinking a lot about, along with our conservation partners, is this sort of dual threat of climate change and development. Long-term habitat fragmentation and climate change are driving what is now referred to as a global biodiversity crisis," said Bart Melton, NPCA's senior director for its Wildlife Program, who joined Leslie onTraveler's podcast. "Scientists are predicting that current levels of habitat loss and impacts from climate change can lead to 40 percent of species being lost globally by the end of the century.
"Planning for the scale of the challenge we're facing I think requires some sort of longer term thinking," he continued. "It's a concern about multiple generations of wildlife and sort of where we'll be at the end of the century and what we're leaving for our children and grandchildren. National parks are no exception to the impacts of climate change and development. We're talking about park biodiversity, everything from not just wildlife, but plants, aquatic species, really entire ecosystems as we know them are threatened. And so connectivity is one of those solutions to addressing those problems."
While the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service all have slightly different missions when it comes to managing parts of the federal public lands kingdom, Melton didn't think getting all those agencies on the same page for wildlife corridors that cross their landscapes would be insurmountable.
"But," he said, "I don't think the federal agencies can do it alone. They have to collaborate with states, they have to work with private landowners, and importantly need to work with tribes, too, in a new and different way. The great news is there's a lot that's happening and has already happened that I think is critically important."
The NPCA official pointed to a secretarial order [3362] then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed in 2018 during the Trump administration that directed the Interior Department to "work with 11 Western states to conserve winter range, migration corridors for most of the game species, mostly ungulates — pronghorn, elk, mule deer. But this has led to a comprehensive improvement of our understanding of ungulate migrations."
More recently, in mid-December, the U.S. Geological Survey released a 134-page report that to serve as a blueprint "to identify and protect (or enhance) ungulate migration corridors and seasonal ranges identified from global positioning system (GPS) collar data."
Leslie was of the opinion that great progress is being made in recognizing and protecting wildlife corridors, but that "it's probably not as fast as I'd like to see."
"And generally it's because funding and time and capacity is very limited when it comes to species restoration," she said. "And you need to not look at just species restoration, but you need to look at habitat restoration. You don't want to put something back into something that's of lesser quality and they're not going to be able to make a go of it in perpetuity. But you can't go to Grand Canyon or now maybe the Redwoods or Zion and look at a condor flying and not be in awe that we brought this thing back. And was that a National Park Service effort alone? Absolutely not. It was states, it was zoos, it was a myriad of organizations that did that. So it's not just a matter of a park going and saying, 'Oh, I'm going to bring back this species.' It takes a lot of people and a lot of energies."
Some of the known migratory routes in the United States/National Fish and Wildlife Foundation
Corridors To Success
While Dr. Newmark has not repeated his 1990s' analysis of wildlife diversity in national parks in the West, he said the fact that NPS managers have successfully recovered some species, such as the wolf in Yellowstone, and that some species are managing to recolonize areas on their own, such as wolverines in Mount Rainier, demonstrates "the value of productivity in terms of enhancing species persistence."
The biologist noted the collaborative efforts being poured into the Y2Y effort as an example of what can be accomplished.
"Last summer I was at a symposium that looked at connectivity, and there were a number of individuals who had been working on the Yellowstone to Yukon project. What was incredibly encouraging about their presentation is actually how successful they have been in terms of working out cooperative arrangements, largely with tribal authorities in Canada to protect these critical migratory routes or movement pathways between protected areas in the northern U.S. up through the Yukon in Canada," he said. "It's actually one of the more successful stories of large-scale connectivity in the world."
Putting these connected landscapes together has resulted in some obvious successes. In his paper Newmark noted that at Banff National Park in Canada wildlife crossings over the trans-Canadian highway have improved genetic connectivity for black and grizzly bears.
"This is some of the most encouraging research that has come out, highlighting that, indeed, it's highly feasible to enhance ecological connectivity by constructing under- and overpasses," said Newmark. "Protecting known migratory routes of ungulates has broad bipartisan support. So this is not a radical idea. This is something that I think virtually all wildlife professionals and a large proportion of the public do support."
While establishing a migratory corridor won't immediately lead to a rush of wildlife along its entirety, said Newmark, they will sort of "leapfrog" along sections. There are, though, exceptions, he noted.
"Gray wolves have recolonized many areas in the Western U.S. They can cover large distances in a short period of time," said Newmark. "Similarly, wolverine have been re-sighted over the last few years in Utah. And these are animals that almost certainly disperse from Yellowstone."
One of the reasons Newmark looked at Yellowstone and Glacier for migratory corridors in his recent paper was because there have been a number of studies of ungulate movements tied to those two parks.
"So we knew where those important migratory routes were and if they intersected, or bisected, these other known migratory pathways," he explained. "Lastly, it's actually very feasible to establish a protected area network and in these two regions because virtually all of the land that's been identified either as a linkage between Yellowstone and Glacier or between Mount Rainier and North Cascades are public lands. So it's practically very feasible. And then lastly, our knowledge about the species that were found there at the time of park establishment is much better than in other areas in western North America. We needed that information for our modeling work."
An artist's rendering of the U.S. 101 wildlife crossing being built in California/National Wildlife Federation
Moving Forward
Protecting such corridors could carry a breathtaking price tag. The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing being built over the 8-lane U.S. 101 freeway in California will be 210 feet long, 170 feet wide, and cost and estimated $92 million. While not all, if any other, overpasses, or underpasses, for wildlife will be of that scope and scale, building more than a few will likely carry a hefty cost. It's something Melton thinks can be covered.
"I think the last transportation reauthorization bill is a good start for us as a country to start to wrap our arms around this issue," he said. "We're hopeful that that funding will support state and federal agencies engaging not just in mitigation, but in studies, much like the mapping of corridors and connectivity and the need for better understanding."
Work being done around Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina to provide safe passage for black bears over Interstate 40 is "being driven by good, hard science, understanding how animals are moving through that space," said Melton. "We need that level of science to inform decision-making on infrastructure investments. But also, it doesn't have to be a standalone project. It can be part of how we build roads in the country over time. But we've got a lot to learn."
The knowledge gap extends into the National Park Service, too.
"There's a lot going on out there, but it's slow because there's compliance and there's funding and there's lack of staff to carry out these initiatives," said Leslie. "But that's what we'd like to see I think in every [NPS] region an action plan that looks at the restoration of at-risk species. But combined with that, not only the restoration of those species, but ensuring their habitat is quality habitat, working with your neighbors to ensure that they have the the amount of room they need to persist. And that whole compounded thing of looking at climate change and what's going to be able to be maintained in that particular park.
"... What I'd like to also see is that every region in the National Park Service has a conservation biologist," she went on. "And that conservation biologist can be in the region or in the Learning Centers, which would be great to to have those as a productive centerpiece for this sort of dialogue. We used to have science advisors in every region, and I don't think we have one anymore, the last couple are now gone. ... I think there are a couple regions that are really making some good moves towards this. But I think it's something that needs to be ingrained in the National Park Service, and really come up with some strategies and visions for the future in those particular regions."
Back at the Natural History Museum of Utah, Newmark didn't think any of these issues were obstacles to succeeding in protecting the needed migratory corridors.
"I think there is incredible broad-based support to conserve our natural heritage," he said. "And one of the things that we saw during the COVID lockdown is that people really started recreating outdoors, and connecting with nature. And this continues since the COVID lockdown. So once again, what we need is actually to enlarge our protected area system. And once again, I think this has broad public support now."
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