In Jackson Hole, Wyoming this June, Berkeley leaders and conservation experts met with alumni and friends of the University, local landowners, and conservationists to share insights from the Stone Center for Environmental Stewardship’s (Stone Center’s) expertise in turning science into action and convening diverse groups in order to advance local, statewide, and federal conservation goals.
Through the Stone Center’s Beyond Yellowstone Living Lab, the team works with landowners, tribes, academics, government officials, and local communities in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem on conservation initiatives across the region’s large, connected landscapes. This includes mapping migratory corridors for species like elk, bears, pronghorn, and bison that move across millions of acres of public, private, and Tribal lands. The Living Lab has succeeded in securing bipartisan support from both the Biden and Trump administrations for protecting these corridors—demonstrating the long-term durability of their approach.
Panel Discussion:
Longstanding Partnerships and Innovative Technology Drive Conservation Progress
The panel was introduced by UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons and moderated by Rausser College of Natural Resources Dean David Ackerly. Panelists included Arthur Middleton, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Management, and Policy and faculty co-director of the Stone Center; Robert Bonnie, former USDA undersecretary and a distinguished fellow at the Stone Center; and Tucker Russell, Stone Center/Beyond Yellowstone Living Lab Tribal Liaison.
From left to right: Robert Bonnie, Arthur Middleton, Rich Lyons, David Ackerly, and Tucker Russell. Photo: Hannah Hardaway Photography
Chancellor Lyons set the stage by outlining the campus’s long connection to the creation and management of National Parks. Alums Stephen Mather, class of 1887, and Horace Albright, class of 1912, convened a conference at Berkeley for scientists, politicians, and administrators in 1915. After a horseback trip through the Sierra Nevada, the National Park Service Organic Act was passed in 1916. Ever since then, Berkeleyans have continued to shape lodging, transportation, wildlife surveys, interpretation, and other key aspects of these natural and cultural wonders.
“Beyond Berkeley's ties to these remarkable parks, our history in the broader field of wildlife and conservation management is legendary, and the field is at an inflection point,” said Lyons. “Gone are the days when a biologist would simply document a particular species in order to understand its natural history. Today, scientists recognize that wildlife must be studied across multiple fields and perspectives, including history, culture, economics, and across multiple groups of stakeholders.”
Lyons noted that some research cannot happen exclusively within the confines of a lab or classroom, and stressed the value of Berkeley’s Stone Center for Environmental Stewardship and its living labs, where he said “Our researchers are collaborating with local conservation organizations, landowners, Tribes, management agencies, and others to advance solutions that will positively impact people, wildlife, beyond.”
He further described a Stone Center collaborative project with local conservation groups and researchers related to large-scale fencing. This involves mapping nearly 400 miles of fence on foot and over 450,000 miles of fence across 11 states using innovative GPS-based technologies to help identify which fences are no longer used and could be removed, or modified to enable safer animal passage.
“This is how Berkeley solves problems today: By partnering directly with communities affected by a particular issue to find common-sense solutions,” said Lyons. “Our alums and friends are the bridge between this world-class research institution and the places where that research matters most.”
Transcript
Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and style.
David Ackerly: I'm joined by three remarkable individuals who know this landscape very well. Arthur Middleton is a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. He did his PhD at the University of Wyoming in 2007. He started working in Yellowstone before that, and has been working in this landscape ever since.
Robert Bonnie is a distinguished scholar at the Stone Center for Environmental Stewardship. Robert served twice as undersecretary at the US Department of Agriculture and has overseen forest conservation, climate, and farm programs. He was also a Rubenstein Fellow at Duke and oversaw land conservation for the Environmental Defense Fund.
Tucker Russell grew up in Lander, Wyoming, and is an enrolled member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe. He completed his master's degree at the University of Wyoming, where he studied Chronic Wasting Disease in mule deer in the Wind River basin, and he now serves as the Tribal Liaison for the Stone Center.
As Rich shared with you all, it's a famous story—certainly one we are very proud of at Berkeley—that Mather and Albright came together and held this conference in 1915. It was actually held in California Hall, possibly the room which is now the Chancellor's conference room, bringing together conservation leaders at the time, leading directly to the passage of the Organic Act and the creation of the National Park Service. Some of the parks, like Yellowstone and others, already existed, but there was no federal service to oversee the management and the future of the parks.
In addition, there was a precocious young naturalist who grew up in San Francisco: George Meléndez Wright. His mother was from a wealthy El Salvadoran family who had immigrated to San Francisco. He became the first bilingual employee of the National Park Service when he was hired to lead a wildlife division, and he set out to establish the scientific basis of understanding the status of wildlife in the parks and the basis for their management.
He authored the very famous Fauna of the National Parks of the United States series.
He died at a young age in a car accident in transit between parks in Texas. I've heard people say that if he had lived, the NPS might have been on a very different trajectory, because some of those early scientific principles he established sort of slipped. In the next couple of decades, the Park Service was not the exemplar in all cases around wildlife management and then returned to many of those principles later. But he established many of them. So I just want to read briefly from Fauna No. 1.
“Speaking of Yellowstone and Grand Teton, these two parks are treated together because their animal problems are not separate. It is to be greatly regretted that Yellowstone, when originally established, did not include the thoroughfare plateau and the intervening territory to the Teton Mountains, as well as sufficient winter range on both north and south sides of the park.”
And then later: “There is not one national park in the United States which provides adequate range for its animal life.”
So in 1933, he was very cognizant of the problem that even our largest parks fundamentally are not big enough to manage the kind of wildlife that inhabit these beautiful places.
So building on that, Arthur, 100 years later, the problem remains about the size and scope of the parks in relation to what you've dedicated your career to. Please set the stage for your research and how you've taken that to approach the broader problem of landscape conservation here in the greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Arthur Middleton: Thanks, David. Thanks Chancellor Lyons. Thanks to all of you for being here. It's the challenge of the past 120 plus years of the parks, but not just these parks. If you look at the chart of parks over time, it starts with Yellowstone (the oldest) and then we see an accelerating curve over the 150 years since. And we now see across the world in ecology and conservation science that parks are almost always too small. They're usually too far apart and often they're in the wrong places—up high in the rocks and the ice where there wasn't a great economic cost to designate a park.
And so we’ve come to know all this. But it has actually been known as a broad pattern by people like Wright, by General Philip Sheridan. When Yellowstone was established, the Army was actually sent to manage it, and even General Sheridan recognized after a few years that it wasn’t big enough. Native Americans could have helped us know this, but we did a really extraordinary job of undermining their ability to share these kinds of lessons and be part of management.
And so we had to find other people who could tell us this. And so, over that time there’s been a growing body of science. Really, it was the monitoring and tracking as the grizzly bear recovered that opened people's eyes to the fact that Yellowstone and Teton Park were too small to protect one of the most important species.
But it's continued to be hard to get that understanding broadly enough among policymakers and among the voting public, among the many stakeholders that we need to do something about it. But starting in 2000, being able to use GPS to track elk, pronghorn, wolves, grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, bison, and other species started to create a compelling body of knowledge.
With pictures and maps, now it's hard not to respond and get a broader understanding out there. We have a 2 million-acre park, but the migration and movements of these animals are like veins and arteries across a 22 million-acre area. A good chunk of that is national forest, but 30% of it is private land. A substantial portion is tribal land: the Wind River Reservation. And so it's been a process of taking these abstractions from the fields that we are part of and actually making that visceral and clear enough to people.
The other issue is that it wasn't that important to understand this because a lot of the private land was just the big, wide open ranches and farms, and that was fine. But now everybody wants to live here, or there's mineral resources or other things that have become more important to running our society. And so we have come to see this more fully through the science, while also realizing that we're about to love this place and use this place to death. And now, the big question is, what are we going to do about it? It's a critical inflection point.
David Ackerly: We’ll definitely come back and hear more about your programs. Now let’s turn to Tucker. Can you add your perspective about the landscape and the role of the tribe as partners in conservation?
Chancellor Lyons facilitated Q&A with the audience and panelists. Photo: Hannah Hardaway Photography
Tucker Russell: As Arthur mentioned, the Wind River Reservation is a key piece of this big ecosystem we call the GYE [Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem]. The reservation is equivalent in size to Yellowstone National Park. Located west of here, it's a much different landscape than what you see here. It's a lot of dryland, shrubs, and arid. It almost looks like southern Utah in some places. Very desert-y, but also transitions up into these high alpine meadows that are really beautiful and similar to what we'd see in this area. And this area, kind of uniquely, was almost forgotten about, where it was this huge section of land that's so important for the ecosystem, but not really understood until more recently through science, largely, but also through cultural knowledge of the Tribes in the area.
Now, as we understand it, a lot of the animals that you would see in this region migrate and live on the reservation throughout the wintertime—much of the year. In a sense, it's like the pulse of the park with the arteries and veins of these migratory pathways. It's a critical component of the ecosystem.
The Tribes are really good partners. They've done an excellent job managing wildlife resources out there, but it hasn't always been like this luxurious area. It's come a long way from what it used to be in the past. I think it speaks to the management of the Tribes.
While grizzly bears were being reintroduced or built back up within the Yellowstone area, the population of pronghorns in the reservation had completely plummeted to almost non-existent. They were reintroduced in the area by the Tribes, which is remarkable, and now there's pronghorn pretty much everywhere on the reservation undergoing these migrations that we're talking about that were otherwise non-existent not that long ago. They also established the first wilderness area back in 1938. This all shows that the Tribes have long recognized the importance of these landscapes.
David Ackerly: Thank you. Robert, you've been at USDA under both Obama and Biden. What has the USDA’s role been in promoting conservation? What was your role at USDA and since leaving the administration?
Robert Bonnie: People think about USDA and they think our job is to put checks in farmers’ mailboxes. That's one thing we do. But when the USDA is staffed at about 100,000 people, 40,000 of those people—40 percent—are in conservation. And if you look at the discretionary budget of USDA, probably half of it, somewhere north of $12 billion annually, is for conservation. Through the U.S. Forest Service we support the management of 193 million acres.
But we also have the largest source of discretionary dollars for conservation to help private landowners, farmers, ranchers, forest owners, tribes and others manage their lands in ways that are productive from an agricultural or forestry standpoint, but that also support wildlife conservation, water quality improvement, soil health, productivity, all those types of things. So we have a lot of resources annually to deploy across the landscape.
In my position, both in the Obama administration and the Biden administration, I've been very involved in how we spend those conservation dollars. One thing USDA has been criticized for in the past—I think fairly—is that we have random acts of conservation. We spread the dollars equally across the landscape. And one of the things we've really tried to do at USDA in the last 20 years is think about how we solve big problems on the landscape, and we do that not only by engaging our own team, but actually by working with partners on the ground.
As I went into my role as Undersecretary for the Biden administration, there were three big things I wanted to do. One of those related to working cooperatively with farmers and ranchers around climate change, and how we could help them be better stewards in a way that added to their bottom line. One was to make sure our farm programs did a better job of serving all farmers and ranchers.
The third big thing was [wildlife] migration. It was how to deploy resources in a way that worked alongside farmers and ranchers that benefited these large migration corridors, and that did so in a way that created strong bipartisan support that would outlive any administration.
One thing you do when you're a political appointee at an administration is, you know you're a short timer: you're fired in four years, or you're fired in eight. It means the clock is always ticking. And for our effort here with Berkeley, we were smart enough to bring Arthur into our office at USDA to get his help designing a conservation program. So we tried to build something as quickly as we could, but at the same time, something that would last.
And I think importantly, the plan that we built to work with private landowners to protect lands through conservation easements, to improve fencing, to make it good for cattle and good for wildlife at the same time, to improve habitat, deal with invasive species—all that stuff that we helped design was embraced by the Trump administration two weeks ago.
They put out a plan that was largely similar to what we put together and embraced this work, showing that there's actually opportunities for bipartisan support if things are designed correctly. That would not have happened without the Stone Center, without Berkeley on the ground building relationships not only with the scientific community, but with the Governor of Wyoming, with the Wyoming stock growers, with tribes, and others. It was the infrastructure that Arthur and his colleagues at Berkeley built here and at the University of Wyoming that allowed USDA to actually deploy resources here in a meaningful way.
David Ackerly: Tucker, in terms of the tribe’s sovereign status, when you interact with the federal government, how does that affect your land management, your partnership (or lack of partnership, whatever it's been over the years with federal administrations)—what does it mean for the future of land management for the tribe and the reservation?
Tucker Russell: On the Wind River Reservation, they have a partnership with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to cooperatively manage wildlife on the reservation. That's a longstanding partnership, and it's been a very good one. So the Fish and Wildlife Service, in conjunction with theT ribes, played pivotal roles in reintroducing pronghorn on the reservation, tracking mule deer and elk migrations on the reservation, and developing hunting game codes to regulate hunting on the reservation.
I think, uniquely, the Tribes here have a good partnership with federal agencies. Having worked with both the Tribes and the feds in the past, I was able to help with communication between the two groups as well as other agencies in the area.
As I said, this region is huge and there are a lot of different land jurisdictions there. There is Tribal land, which is managed in trust for the Tribes by the federal government. There's the state of Wyoming, there's the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, which owns land near the tribe. There's also private property, as well as the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service. So there's a wealth of people in this area and different land management agencies.
One role of myself as a liaison is bringing different groups to the table to identify similar objectives, and carrying those out on the reservation. And there's a lot of opportunity there for conservation.
David Ackerly: Arthur, to what extent is it an asset or a liability being someone who comes from Berkeley, but also has pre-existing relationships in this area?
Arthur Middleton: You just treat people with dignity and respect, and meet them where they are, and listen to them. Unfortunately, I think that’s unusual enough in today's America that it's recognized.
If you're willing to go back a few times and reengage with folks if they were a little chilly at first, you form a friendship. I've done it by just assuming the best in people. I'm naturally curious about how a ranch works, and I’ll ask folks to drive me around and show me the operations of their ranch.
When I was working in the Biden administration with Robert, we planned a visit from the Biden administration to the reservation and met with the Intertribal Council.
There is a history of failed promises and both people at the reservation or rural livestock producers feeling looked past and ignored. And if you show up and ask questions and listen, you begin to have a relationship that you can then do things with.
We're working on the wolf recovery in Northern California, which is really challenging and difficult, particularly for our ranchers in a number of the northeastern California counties. What I've learned from that is that when you form that relationship, you can suddenly get some of the people saying “we've got one on the other side who can help translate here.” And so there's a real hunger for people who can help folks in Sacramento or the Bay Area or LA understand the concerns of folks out on the landscape and help translate across that divide. Once people realize that you're willing and able to do that in an honest and authentic way, you can actually quickly gain traction in ways that I've been surprised by.
David Ackerly: Arthur’s group did some surveys recently in Northern California about who's a trusted source of information on the wolf issue, and the University of California comes as the most trusted source of information. And this is the best role we can play in society: that of an honest broker. As you say, relationships are key.
Robert, after your role with the Biden administration ended, what brought you to Berkeley and what do you hope to accomplish in the time you're spending with us?
Robert Bonnie: You and the Chancellor both talked about Berkeley's history in conservation in the United States, and I think there's history to be made right now. The conservation community has largely thought our focus is going to be on parks, protected areas, public lands, and they've forgotten about private working lands, farms, ranches, tribal lands. As Arthur describes, the game in Yellowstone will be won or lost on our ability to conserve lands outside the border of the park, outside the border of the national forest.
Can we work with ranchers to conserve habitat? Can we live in a landscape where you have bears and wolves and other things? That's where this game is going to be won or lost. Just as Berkeley played a critical role 100 plus years ago in defining the future of conservation, we're at a pivotal point right now where conservation needs to adapt to being able to work across larger landscapes, to be able to work with ranchers who haven't always gotten along with folks in the conservation or environmental community, to get along with people in forestry and to build progress on the ground.
Yellowstone has been an incredibly important part of conservation here because it's important here and important globally. If we can solve these problems here with the science that we have here, and we can demonstrate how to work in a landscape where environmental policy has been a real challenge for a long time…if we can demonstrate that we can do this at scale, we can apply this model to a lot of other places. We are trying to think about these issues more broadly. How can we influence where the conservation community is headed? How can we influence the folks that fund the conservation community to have it be more pragmatic, more bipartisan, and more effective over the long term?
View of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Photo: Madhavi Colton.
David Ackerly: Thank you.
Arthur, can you give a few examples of conservation-friendly ranching or practices?
Arthur Middleton: For one, working on conservation easements, which are agreements that prevent development, or at least most development on properties. While I was at the USDA, we also did a lot of work to advance models for more temporary conservation agreements. Some families aren't ready to enter a permanent agreement but they might consider a 10 or 15 year agreement to avert development and manage their land in a way that's good for wildlife. Habitat leasing, fencing modifications, the deployment of virtual fences, changes in grazing practices to leave more for wildlife…
Robert Bonnie: There’s been a lot of investments in bison restoration on tribal lands in the West as well.
Middleton: Right. And some of that involves work with tribal ranchers on how to rearrange grazing to accommodate more bison.
Ackerly: We can now open up to questions from the group.
Audience member: We can have conservation and still have housing in the West, if it's done in the proper way. What are your thoughts?
Ackerly: Right. Ranching was predominant here for a long time, but there's a lot of housing being developed now.
Middleton: I think that conservation gets stuck sometimes on nature or development. Some of the species we’re trying to protect are incredibly sensitive to developments, but other times—including in the case of some of the wildlife here—there's a flexibility to deal with human activity. A lot of the work that my group has been doing is trying to understand thresholds. At what point do we get such a dense development or a particular composition of development that we actually change the willingness of wildlife to tolerate that? It varies for species, and seasons, and things like that.
GPS data, which is much more detailed information than it has been, has facilitated that conversation about where we need to be careful and avoid obstructions in development and where we could tolerate, and encourage the kind of development that people need. The conversation now is about balance.
Audience member: Tucker, what are the conservation priorities of the tribes today, and how aligned are they with what these gentlemen are trying to accomplish? And are there conflicts or pressures or, how do you see that landscape?
Russell: The priorities of the Tribes right now, generally, are maintaining wildlife populations that already exist out there. But there's of course, new and encroaching threats on the reservation to those wildlife populations. Probably one of the most prominent ones includes invasive annual grasses like cheatgrass. It's a pretty aggressive, invasive plant species that's beginning to occupy these shrublands on the reservation. It can easily dominate or create monocultures in that area and is incredibly difficult to manage. That is probably one of the top priorities there. And that trickles down to all the other wildlife species, including mule deer, sage grouse, and then potentially bison in the future.
I would say on the reservation, there's also a lot of interest in reintroducing native species that were there previously. So Buffalo, there's an ongoing effort there which is really remarkable and exciting. And we'll see as that progresses over time.
Additionally, some of the stuff that we work on specifically is the fence work. We're actively mapping fences there, trying to get a sense of what fences are there, what condition they're in, if they're dilapidated or up and sturdy. From that, we'll leverage all the GPS data that's been collected over the years to see where we can target fences for removal to facilitate these movements that already exist, and ensure they persist in the future.
I believe this aligns pretty well with a lot of the state wildlife agencies and federal wildlife agencies, USDA, and NGO organizations and their goals. And that's because there's been communication lines open between these groups and they have similar objectives. So that's really exciting and creates a lot of momentum moving forward on the reservation.
Middleton: I would add that not long after we visited and met with the Intertribal Council, they said if USDA is interested in being helpful on these wildlife corridors we'd like to participate in that. And they directed the Tribal fish and game department to identify a priority area. The priority area they identified was the winter range and a portion of the corridor for the Wind River mule deer that come here in the summer.
And then that influenced the governor of Wyoming's interest in making sure that the part of that corridor that's off the reservation on the National Forest and over here in Jackson was being recognized by the state. And so while that relationship can be challenging at times, for good reasons, on conservation there's been an interest in how to meet one another, and then align across that boundary.
Rich Lyons: One of the phrases we heard today was, “there is history to be made right now.” And I think we need to keep thinking big. As one of society’s most valuable assets, how can Berkeley help galvanize us around planetary health, or more specifically, around conservation over the next ten years? That's an important question.
See the Latest from the Living Lab
- Visit High Country News for research from Arthur and Wyoming collaborators with new findings on the relationship between housing development and migratory corridors.
- Read Tucker’s latest publication, From the Field: Elevating Indigenous Voices, on the impacts of disease on mule deer and local hunting in the Wind River Basin.
- Learn more about the Living Lab’s fence mapping efforts, including how virtual fencing can advance conservation goals in Biological Conservation