Subtitles section Play video
-
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.