Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Yellowstone National Park—the world’s first national park—sits atop a dormant volcano, hosts the most diverse natural system in the Lower 48, and is home to 386 species.

Ecologists have long recognized that the national park alone cannot protect the region’s abundant wildlife. As autumn advances and the park interiors are blanketed by several feet of snow, animals instinctively follow age-old pathways to lower-elevation valleys. Public and private lands outside the park provide vital linkages to winter habitat elsewhere in the natural system.

Together, Trust for Public Land and dedicated partners have protected more than 200,000 acres of key wildlife habitat in the surrounding areas known as the Greater Yellowstone region.

Safeguarding the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem also creates access for hunters and guides, anglers, skiers, horseback riders, snowmobilers, and recreationists—all part of a natural-amenity economy worth more than $1 billion a year to local communities.

A few areas protected:  

Taylor Fork: Decades ago, the Taylor Fork drainage was in jeopardy of being developed and fragmented, and many of its wildlife corridors blocked forever. This prospect was particularly troubling to bear biologists such as Chuck Schwartz, who oversees the Yellowstone Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, headquartered in Bozeman.

“The Taylor Fork has the highest density of bears in the northern half of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,” Schwartz says. With plenty of elk calves, rodents, and a wide variety of native plants to eat, some grizzly bear sows have given birth to as many as four cubs in a litter, twice the usual number. “It’s not just incredibly productive for grizzly bears,” Schwartz says, “the Taylor Fork is a rich piece of real estate for a whole array of species.”

Duck Creek: Duck Creek nurtures a wide riparian floodplain thick with willow. Grizzly bears use the corridor to travel from the park to nearby Hebgen Lake, along with moose, elk, and bison. Brown, brook, and rainbow trout spawn in the creek’s cobble bottom.

A few years ago, a developer sought to build an 18-hole golf course and almost 1,000 homes on 320 acres overlooking Duck Creek, adjacent to the park and Gallatin National Forest. The plan would pose a gauntlet for migrating wildlife and pollute the stream. No sooner had that project been stopped by a district court judge than another development of 71 homes was proposed on an adjacent tract. TPL acquired this parcel in 2004 and transferred it to the U.S. Forest Service. Today, a picnic area and fishing site sit on the creek’s banks, and wildlife moves through the area unimpeded.

Sun Ranch: If any segment of land is compromised by development, the ecological integrity of the whole corridor can fall apart. For this reason, conservation groups have been protecting habitats in the Madison Valley along the elks’ route. In 2002, Trust for Public Land partnered with The Nature Conservancy to protect 6,800 acres of the 18,000-acre Sun Ranch in the upper Madison Valley with a conservation easement. The ranch is home to 8,000 elk—the second-largest elk herd in the natural system—and also offers habitat for wolves, grizzlies, lynx, fisher, martens, and wolverines.

“Thanks to the perseverance of Alex Diekmann and TPL, some complicated land deals were put together that nobody thought had a chance of getting accomplished. Future managers [will have] wonderful opportunities to conserve wildlife—opportunities that easily could have been lost,” says Kurt Alt of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.