Twenty years ago, the largest fire-fighting effort in United States history was underway in Yellowstone National Park.

The park bounced back, but an even greater threat now looms — development outside of the park is destroying important winter habitat for wildlife like elk and grizzlies.

Paul Hansen, director of the Conservancy’s Greater Yellowstone Program, discusses Yellowstone’s modern-day firestorm — a conservation challenge millions of visitors don’t even know exists.

Nature.org: Tell us what was happening exactly twenty years ago in Yellowstone National Park?

Paul Hansen: Fire and smoke. Forty percent of the park burned, some areas more intensely than others. That fall, the entire park was closed to the public for the first time in its history. Lots of small fires burned into each other, fueled by dry storms that brought howling winds and dry lightning strikes but no rain.

Nature.org: Can you still see evidence of the fires today?

Paul Hansen: The fires are still very evident, but it is equally evident that recovery is occurring. Wildlife are again using even the most intensely burned areas.

The fires made Yellowstone's abundant summer habitat more open and diverse, which has some advantages for wildlife. I visited the park in 1989, the year after the fires. Even then recovery was occurring.

Nature.org: How did wildlife fare in the fires?

Paul Hansen: A lot better than you'd think. Animals are surprisingly resilient to fire — a year later, grizzlies were more common in areas that had burned, feeding on the new plant growth. And very few large mammals died in the fires. Yellowstone’s wildlife is in more jeopardy today than it ever was during the fires.

Nature.org: Why is that?

Paul Hansen: A lot of people think of Yellowstone in terms of what's protected within the park’s boundaries. But most mammals like elk move in and out of the park during the year, especially in the winter months when as much as 50 feet of snow can fall in the park’s high elevation lands.

Nature.org: When this happens, where do animals like elk go?

Paul Hansen: Every year the vast majority of the park's large, plant-eating mammals leave the park to winter in low elevation valleys, mostly on private land.

Nature.org: What’s the biggest threat to these winter habitats outside the park?

Paul Hansen: We are. The valleys around the park are where people want to live, drawing more and more residents each year who come to enjoy the area’s scenery and recreational opportunities. The Greater Yellowstone region has grown at twice the nation’s population growth rate.

Without action, in the next 10 years most of this habitat will be gone — and much of the wildlife that depends on it will be gone, too. Very few of the three-million people visiting the park each year have any sense of that.

Nature.org: So what is the Conservancy doing about it?

Paul Hansen: The Conservancy has identified 2.8 million acres that are most important to the survival of Greater Yellowstone’s wildlife. Working collaboratively with others, we have an ambitious goal to protect 1 million of these acres — the most important 4 percent of the total Greater Yellowstone wildlife habitat — by 2015. 

Nature.org: Can it be done?

Paul Hansen: With enough public support, we believe that voluntary habitat protection agreements with ranchers and other private landowners can protect the most vital winter habitat — ensuring that future generations will experience Yellowstone much as we do today.
 

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © John Morrow II (elk); Photo © Joe Kiesecker(ranchland).