Misplaced Pages

Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
(Redirected from Yellowstone to Yukon) Non-profit organisation in the USA
Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative
Formation1993
HeadquartersCanmore, Alberta, Canada
Key peopleDr. Jodi Hilty (President & Chief Scientist)
Websitehttps://y2y.net/

Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative or Y2Y is a transboundary Canada–United States not-for-profit organization that aims to connect and protect the 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometres) Yellowstone-to-Yukon region. Its mission proposes to maintain and restore habitat integrity and connectivity along the spine of North America's Rocky Mountains stretching from the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem to Canada's Yukon Territory. It is the only organization dedicated to securing the long-term ecological health of the region.

Since 1993, more than 700 partner groups have joined forces to support the shared mission and vision. Y2Y's work is a collaborative effort of conservation groups, government agencies, Indigenous governments, landowners, wildlife scientists, planners, businesses, economists, and other individuals and groups interested in protecting native wildlife, ecological processes, and wilderness in the Rocky Mountains of North America.

Existing national, state, and provincial parks and wilderness areas anchor the system, while the creation of new protected and special management areas provide the additional cores and corridors needed to complete it. This network is built upon the principles of conservation biology, various focal species assessments, the knowledge of local and traditional residents, and the requirements for sustainable economies.

Mission

Connecting and protecting habitat from Yellowstone to Yukon so people and nature can thrive.

Primary role

To achieve its vision across 2,100 mi (3,400 km), Y2Y protects core wildlife habitats, keeps those habitats connected and inspires others to engage in similar work.

Y2Y highlights and focuses on local issues that have implications for the region as a whole. The organization engages in landscape-scale conservation, an approach that focuses on actions and management across large areas, such as entire watersheds.

The organization collaborates with hundreds of partners across the Rocky Mountains, including conservation groups, landowners, businesses, government agencies, Indigenous governments, scientists, and local communities. Their goal is to create a unified movement supporting large-scale land conservation that protects wildlife habitats while balancing human needs, creating corridors that allow animals to move freely and promoting coexistence between nature and communities.

History

Between 1991 and 1993, Pluie, a wolf radio-collared in southern Alberta, was tracked as it traveled more than 40,000 sq mi (100,000 km) and covered an area 10 times the size of Yellowstone National Park and 15 times that of Banff National Park. Pluie crossed more than 30 different political jurisdictions (including three states, two provinces, private lands, and First Nation’s territories) before being shot and killed in a legal hunt south of Kootenay National Park in December 1995.

The scientific research Pluie's movements showed wildlife needed larger areas than biologists thought and pointed to a need to connect large sections of habitat along the spine of the Rocky Mountains as the best method to ensure there would be wildlife and wild spaces thriving into the future. Other animals such as lynx, cougars, golden eagles and bull trout have also been recorded traveling distances of more than 1,000 mi (1,600 km). These movements inspired people to reconsider the scale nature needs to thrive and also launched the formative idea behind Y2Y.

The Yellowstone-to-Yukon region is one of the most ambitious corridor projects on the North American continent. Since 1993 Yellowstone to Yukon's conservationists have supported wildlife crossings over and under highways, helped track wolverines and purchased more than 500,000 acres of land to preserve wildlife routes.

Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative's mission and model has inspired other similar collaborations including:

Priorities

To work successfully over such a large transboundary landscape with a diversity of challenges and opportunities, Y2Y states their mission demands a multi-pronged approach.

The organization engages on projects within three program areas: landscape protection, landscape connection and communities and conservation, paired with science and Indigenous knowledge and policy and government relations . Stated 2030 goals include:

  1. Landscape protection: Protect 30 percent of the Yellowstone to Yukon region.
  2. Landscape connection: Safeguard four key wildlife corridors by restoring animal movement across the busiest roads and advancing voluntary private land conservation.
  3. Communities and conservation: Ensure communities incorporate tools and approaches that support what nature and people need at the Yellowstone to Yukon scale.
  4. Policy and government relations: Work closely with communities and decision-makers to make a positive impact in the Yellowstone to Yukon region, supporting Y2Y’s vision and priority conservation outcomes shared by partners. Ensure enduring conservation by promoting a strong policy framework of laws and practices to advance Y2Y’s non-partisan policy goals at all government levels, including Indigenous, federal, state, provincial, territorial, and global.
  5. Science and Indigenous knowledge: Use the best available information, including science and Indigenous and local knowledge, to guide conservation efforts in the Yellowstone to Yukon region.

Conservation achievements

From 1993-2018, the actions of Y2Y and partners resulted in an 80.5 percent increase in growth of key protected areas. During the same time period, protected areas in the Yellowstone to Yukon region grew by 7.8 percent, by 41,424 sq mi (107,290 km).

Research shows the Yellowstone to Yukon region is home to the world’s most intact, least developed mountain system with 15.6 percent protection. The lands for this percentage are drawn from the IUCN protected area categories.

In popular culture

The story of Pluie the wolf inspired a storyline on the television show The West Wing. The season 1 episode, The Crackpots and These Women, has a character played by Nick Offerman proposing the construction of an "1,800 mile wolves-only roadway" to White House Press Secretary C. J. Cregg.

Photography and media

A 2005 book by Karsten Heuer, Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bears' Trail, detailed the wildlife biologist and park warden's 18-month journey with his dog from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming to the Canadian Yukon by hiking, skiing, and paddling across mountains, forests, and rivers.

In 2011, Yellowstone to Yukon: the Journey of Wildlife and Art, a collaborative exhibition curated by the National Museum of Wildlife Art, the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, artist Dwayne Harty, cofounder Harvey Locke and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative featured images, art and stories from the Yellowstone-to-Yukon region, and was eventually published as a book.

A 2016 episode of Nova titled Wild Ways featured Y2Y's work and how newly established wildlife corridors offer hope to the planet's endangered species.

See also

References

  1. Aengst, Peter (February 1999). "The Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative: A New Conservation Paradigm to Protect the Heart of North America" (PDF). Proceedings of a Conference on the Biology and Management of Species and Habitats at Risk. 1: 895–900.
  2. Dean, Cornelia (May 23, 2006). "Wandering Wolf Inspires Project". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 2, 2017. Retrieved May 26, 2020.
  3. "Pluie the Wolf". National Park Service. Retrieved May 26, 2020.
  4. Guarino, Ben (March 18, 2020). "Safe Passages: Rocky Mountain animals will move as the climate warms. These corridors could give them an easier path". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on May 26, 2020. Retrieved May 26, 2020.
  5. Jessen, Sabine (January 1999). "Baja to the Bering Sea - A North American Marine Conservation Initiative". Environments. 27: 67–89.
  6. "Y2Y Approach".
  7. "2023 Strategic Plan".
  8. Hebblewhite, M.; et al. (January 2022). "Can a large-landscape conservation vision contribute to achieving biodiversity targets?". Conservation Science and Practice. 4 (1).
  9. Theobald, D.; et al. (June 2024). "Evaluating ecosystem protection and fragmentation of the world's major mountain regions". Conservation Biology. 38 (3).
  10. Heuer, Karsten (2005). Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bears' Trail. The Mountaineers Books. p. 238. ISBN 0898869838.
  11. King, Anthony (2011-08-03). "How art is saving the West by Anthony King". Nature. 476 (7358): 32. doi:10.1038/476032a.
  12. "Wildlife art: portraits of an untamed country by Todd Wilkinson". Christian Science Monitor. 2011-08-10. Retrieved September 7, 2011.
  13. "Dwayne Harty captures Yellowstone to Yukon by Todd Wilkinson August 2011". Big Sky Journal. Archived from the original on September 26, 2011. Retrieved September 7, 2011.
  14. Harris, Adam (May 2011). Yellowstone to Yukon: the Journey of Wildlife and Art. USA: Western Art Collector. pp. 40–45.
  15. "Wild Ways". IMDb. April 20, 2016. Retrieved November 1, 2019.

External links

Categories: