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Elk at the Opal Terrace at Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park. The Leopold Report, officially known as Wildlife Management in the National Parks, is a 1963 paper composed of a series of ecosystem management recommendations that were presented by the Special Advisory Board on Wildlife Management to United States Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.
In recent years, however, Yellowstone's elk population has plummeted. The Northern Herd, the only herd that winters in the park, has declined from nearly 20,000 animals in 1994 to less than 4,000 in 2013. Ecologists have linked this decline to a declining population of cutthroat trout in Yellowstone Lake, caused by invasive lake trout. With ...
As elk populations rose, the quality of the range decreased affecting many other animals. Without wolves, coyote populations increased dramatically which adversely impacted the pronghorn antelope population. [11] However, it was the overly large elk populations that caused the most profound changes to the ecosystem of Yellowstone with the ...
May 14—The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is starting a new study aimed at determining why elk herds in the Blue Mountains declined and what is keeping them from bouncing back.
Yellowstone National Park is symbolic of the American West to many. ... It also has one of the largest elk herds in North America and is the only place in the lower 48 states that has had a ...
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A cow/calf winter herd is a herd that consists only of female elk and their young. In a normal winter, defined as one where there is a decent amount of snow fall, one study found that when the groups of cows and calves were safe from predation by wolves, about 75.6-83.0% of their diet was made up of graze whereas when wolves were present this number dropped to 61.6-69.4%. [3]
In the Leopold Report, the committee observed that culling programs at other national parks had been ineffective, and recommended active management of Yellowstone's elk population. [29] Elk overpopulation in Yellowstone is thought by many wildlife biologists, such as Douglas Smith, to have been primarily caused by the extirpation of wolves from ...