Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Contemporary rural gentrification – the colonization of rural communities and small-towns by members of the ex-urban middle class – is a nationwide phenomenon that contradicts nearly two centuries of US urbanization. While previous research primarily describes such counter-urbanization as representing a profound divergence from previous patterns (i.e. urbanization, mass production/consumption, etc.), I contend that rural gentrification is best understood as the product of both continuity and change relative to the ideas/practices of Modernity and current postindustrialization. Based on ethnographic research conducted in a community in south central Montana, I present evidence that the choice by middle-class newcomers to migrate to the rural US is simultaneously the product of: 1) the continued efficacy of the Modern ideals of authenticity and progress; and 2) their aspirations to distinguish themselves as members of an emerging class faction – the postindustrial middle class (PIMC)– through their emphasis upon the production and consumption of experiences.

Archaeological investigations at the Goetz Site (48TE455) on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Elk Refuge in Teton County, Wyoming were initiated in 2000. The project involves the financial and administrative support of two federal agencies, the local historical society, the local chapter of the state archaeological society, private individuals and companies, and an international conservation organization, plus thousands of volunteer hours. This project is unusual for the assistance program at the National Park Service’s (NPS) Midwest Archeological Center by being problem-oriented and not motivated by Section 106.
The original research focus of the project was to understand the role of bison in the precontact ecology and economy of Jackson Hole. Traditionally, bison have been viewed as a minor component of the Jackson Hole fauna. In his book, People of the High Country: Jackson Hole Before the Settlers, Gary Wright (1984) stated that bison were unpredictable and too small in number to provide a stable food resource. Wright’s arguments were based upon limited archaeological evidence of bison and the relatively small modern Jackson Hole herd. Since the publication of Wright’s book, archaeological excavations in Grand Teton National Park and southern Jackson Hole suggest bison may have been more common prehistorically than previously envisioned.

Greater Yellowstone ecosystem and to the Central Idaho area in an attempt to restore the endangered gray wolf to the Rocky Mountains. The restoration of wolves to Yellowstone National Park has become one of the most successful wildlife conservation programs in the history of endangered species conservation. Yellowstone is now considered one of the best places in the world to watch wild wolves. Visibility of the wolves within the park, and public interest in wolves and wolf-based education programs, have far exceeded initial expectations. During the preparation of the environmental impact statement (EIS; US Fish and Wildlife Service 1994) that was completed by the National Park Service (NPS) prior to wolf restoration, more than 170,000 public comments were reviewed to determine the public’s key concerns. One of the main issues identified during this process was the concern about the possible economic effects of wolf restoration. Among the concerns of opponents were the expenditure of...

Although a number of Native American groups interacted with the Yellowstone region, the Sheep Eater band of Shoshone (or Tukudika), as the only year-round residents, present an opportunity to explore the role of humans in the ecological history of the world’s first national park. In this paper I consider how they lived before the creation of the park, their relationship to the land, and how well-suited their lifeways were to it. Next, I review the factors that led to the creation of Yellowstone National Park and the forcible displacement of the Sheep Eaters. I then contemplate the implications of these events along with the larger debate over a sustainable human relationship with nature. Finally, I discuss where Yellowstone National Park and the National Park Service (NPS) are today, as well as opportunities for co-management and reintegration of the Sheep Eaters and their story into the future of Yellowstone. In keeping with recognition of a greater potential role for the National Park Service, I conclude that the NPS could promote sustainable lifeways beyond the parks by drawing on lessons learned from the past in its interpretive features, as well as encouraging localized adaptations to the places where we each live.

Scheiber, Laura L. and Judson B. Finley (2010)  Mountain Shoshone Technological Transitions across the Great Divide.  In Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400-1900, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, pp. 128-148.  University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Using x-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis from nearly 2,300 sourced obsidian artifacts in western Wyoming, southwestern Montana, and eastern Idaho, we demonstrate regional diachronic changes in access to and preference for particular obsidian sources throughout the West. We focus on both (1) long-term patterns of obsidian use that may inform us about the timing of precontact migrations of Numic (Shoshone) speakers into the Rocky Mountains and (2) the extent to which later contact among Native inhabitants and European immigrants was a mechanism for reducing elements of precontact mobility and exchange in the postcontact era. We view indigenous responses to contact in the study area as an active, strategic process with measurable material consequences. Despite a well-documented increase in mobility among local Native groups as a result of the introduction of the horse, our study demonstrates a restriction and reduction in Historic period source use in western Wyoming. We propose that changes in obsidian source use are a reflection of ethnogenesis and development of ethnographic bands as a response to culture contact among indigenous inhabitants and with Europeans.

Using x-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis from nearly 2,300 sourced obsidian artifacts in western Wyoming, southwestern Montana, and eastern Idaho, we demonstrate regional diachronic changes in access to and preference for particular obsidian sources throughout the West. We focus on both (I) long-term patterns of obsidian use that may inform us about the timing of precontact migrations of Numic (Shoshone) speakers into the Rocky Mountains and (2) the extent to which later contact among Native inhabitants and European immigrants was a mechanism for reducing elements of precontact mobility and exchange in the postcontact era. We view indigenous responses to contact in the study area as an active, strategic process with measurable material consequences. Despite a well-documented increase in mobility among local Native groups as a result of the introduction of the horse, our study demonstrates a restriction and reduction in Historic period source use in western Wyoming. We propose that ch...

Archaeologists worldwide know very little about the immense ecosystem changes already underway in the mountains and the threats that anthropogenic climate change poses to high elevation cultural resources. So how do we proceed? What do we prioritize? Is high elevation ice resilient to these changing climates, and if so, how much? How much time do we have before mid-latitude high elevation ice disappears entirely? This paper comments on the impacts of climate change to high elevation cultural resources, particularly ice patches, whose presence as a constant source of water is vital to the general appeal of high elevations for human occupation. Beyond their ecological importance, ice patches can also preserve ancient organic artifacts and paleobiological material for over 10,000 years. And they are melting rapidly thanks to anthropogenic climate change. This paper offers a case study of two groups of archaeologically productive high elevation ice patches from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, analyzing their resiliency in the face of warming temperatures and changing climates. Ultimately, I conclude that high elevation patches of ice and snow may be losing their resiliency to warmer temperatures as their ancient ice melts, making them ever more vulnerable to climate change. Ice patch researchers are in a race against time to identify productive ice patches and recover any fragile artifacts or paleobiological material they may contain before they melt completely. For many of these patches, this would be their first complete melt since the early Holocene.

The North American Dendroecological Field week (NADEF) is an intensive dendrochronology workshop, funded in part by the National Science Foundation. The 2019 Introductory Group at NADEF developed two precisely dated tree-ring width chronologies for Pinus contorta (lodgepole pine) and Pinus flexilis (limber pine) at the Wolf Knob site ca. 5 km west of Beartooth Lake, WY, within the bounds of the Shoshone National Forest (SNF), in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE). Wolf Knob is a semi-arid, S- to SW-facing, mid- to high-elevation site, making it an ideal location to examine the climate sensitivity of annual tree-ring width increments. Here, we show that two co-located Pinus species exhibit differing climate–growth relationships, with P. contorta exhibiting relatively weak correlations with precipitation (r = 0.37; p < 0.01) and temperature (r = –0.23; p < 0.05) during the late summer, and
P. flexilis exhibiting stronger overall correlations with both cool-season (r = 0.48; p < 0.01) and warm season precipitation (r = 0.51; p < 0.01) as well as with snowpack records (r = 0.45; p < 0.05). Our results suggest these two Pinus species may face disparate threats in the face of regional climate change, with P. flexilis being particularly vulnerable to drought conditions and declining snowpacks in the GYE.
The differing seasonal climate sensitivities of the two species is likely caused by microsite conditions (e.g. soil moisture capacity, incoming solar radiation) and distinct species-climate responses, underscoring the importance of not only site selection, but also microsite and individual selection in dendroclimatological sampling. Finally, this work contributes to identifying Snow Water Equivalent (SWE)-sensitive tree-ring proxies in the GYE, critical for understanding ongoing warming-induced snowpack declines across western North America, particularly given the projections of a largely snow-free (April 1) GYE by 2075.

Written for the U.S. Forest Service as a Society for Wilderness Stewardship wilderness fellow in 2017 following months of research.

The Absaroka and Beartooth Mountains are an impressive landscape today, but only a shadow of their spectacular past: remnant glaciers and exposed rock reveal a story of transformation stretching back billions of years. Fifty million years ago, the Beartooth Mountains loomed over the surrounding landscape—over 20,000 feet above sea level—before being overcome in a long tug-of-war between the diminishing forces of erosion and periodic buildup by volcanic eruptions. Over millennia, these high mountains collected snow—storm by storm, snowflake by snowflake—until fused by time and pressure into dense glacial ice, which first began to erode the Range over two million years ago. Individual glaciers filled valleys and eventually merged, culminating 100,000 years ago in a single sheet of ice nearly 4,000 feet thick, one of several successive ice sheets that covered most of the Greater Yellowstone, scraping the landscape down into its current form, until ice finally began to recede around 13,000 years ago. This narrative describes five tangible qualities of wilderness character in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness: natural, untrammeled, undeveloped, solitude or primitive and unconfined recreation, and other features of value. These qualities provide insight into future measurements of wilderness character and are described to assist in selecting indicators for future monitoring. After identifying and highlighting these qualities, monitoring will be the next key management tool to preserve the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness so it can retain its wild character and be left unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness.

The contemporary American West is undergoing a round of rapid restructuring, which has been characterized as the shift from landscapes of production to landscapes of consumption. Here I propose that a more effective description of current changes, which allows us to retain focus on the relevant inter- and intra-class-based dynamics of an ongoing capitalist-Modernity, is as a result of the transition from the prior dominance of a regime of production/consumption of commodities/natural-resources to the increasing ascendancy of the production/consumption of “experiences.” The rising dominance of this regime is, in large part, the result of the locally dramatic in-migration by ex-urban members of the post-industrial middle class to the “amenity-rich” counties of the region. This process of rural gentrification exacerbates preexisting social, geographic, and environmental disparities within the region creating an “archipelago” of changing communities commonly referred to as the “New” West. Drawing on almost two years of ethnographic research from one such “island” community in south-central Montana, I describe local-level change between the relative primacy of the two regimes of production/consumption.

Greater Yellowstone ecosystem and to the Central Idaho area in an attempt to restore the endangered gray wolf to the Rocky Mountains. The restoration of wolves to Yellowstone National Park has become one of the most successful wildlife conservation programs in the history of endangered species conservation. Yellowstone is now considered one of the best places in the world to watch wild wolves. Visibility of the wolves within the park, and public interest in wolves and wolf-based education programs, have far exceeded initial expectations. During the preparation of the environ- mental impact statement (EIS; US Fish and Wildlife Service 1994) that was completed by the National Park Service (NPS) prior to wolf restoration, more than 170,000 public comments were reviewed to determine the public&#x27;s key concerns. One of the main issues identified during this process was the concern about the possible economic effects of wolf restoration. Among the con- cerns of opponents were the expen...

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in the northern Rocky Mountains provides the context for a natural experiment to investigate the response of consumers to resources with differing spatial and temporal dispersion regimes. Grey wolves (Canis lupus) and human hunters both provide resource subsidies to scavengers by provisioning them with the remains of their kills. Carrion from hunter kills is highly aggregated

Zooarchaeological evidence has often been called on to help researchers determine prehistoric relative abundances of elk (Cervus elaphus) in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Some interpret that evidence as indicating elk were abundant; others interpret it as indicating elk were rare. Wildlife biologist Charles Kay argues that prehistoric faunal remains recovered from archaeological sites support his contention that aboriginal hunters depleted

Proposed Management Plan for YNP which stresses the need to have free roaming and healthy populations of Bison, Wolves, and Grizzly Bear across the Yellowstone Basin. Research has proven that these Keystone species are critical to produce and maintain a healthy ecosystem in the Yellowstone region. Some of these benefits are discussed in detail, with the conclusion being that Ranching interests currently stand in the way of proper environmental management in the area and suggests ways in which these ranching interests can be mitigated to palliated.

Western US Forest managers face more wildfires than ever before, and it is increasingly imperative to anticipate the consequences of this trend. Large fires in the northern Rocky Mountains have increased in association with warmer temperatures, earlier snowmelt, and longer fire seasons (1), and this trend is likely to continue with global warming (2). Increased wildfire occurrence is already a

Western US Forest managers face more wildfires than ever before, and it is increasingly imperative to anticipate the consequences of this trend. Large fires in the northern Rocky Mountains have increased in association with warmer temperatures, earlier snowmelt, and longer fire seasons (1), and this trend is likely to continue with global warming (2). Increased wildfire occurrence is already a concern shared by managers from many federal land-management agencies (3). However, new analyses for the western US suggest that future climate could diverge even more rapidly from past climate than previously suggested. Current model projections suggest end-of-century hydroclimatic conditions like those of 1988 (the year of the well-known Yellowstone Fires) may represent close to the average year rather than an extreme year. The consequences of a shift of this magnitude for the fire regime, post-fire succession and carbon (C) balance of western forest ecosystems are well beyond what scientists have explored to date, and may fundamentally change the potential of western forests to sequester atmospheric C. We link hydroclimatic extremes (spring and summer temperature and cumulative water-year moisture deficit) to extreme fire years in northern Rockies forests, using large forest fire histories and 1/8-degree gridded historical hydrologic simulations (1950 - 2005) (4) forced with historical gridded temperature and precipitation (5). The frequency of extremes in hydroclimate associated with historic severe fire years in the northern Rocky Mountains is compared to those projected under a range of climate change projections, using global climate model runs for the A2 and B1 emissions pathways for three global climate models (NCAR PCM1, GFDL CM2.1, CNRM CM3). Coarse-scale climatic variables are downscaled to a 1/8 degree grid and used to force hydrologic simulations (6, 7). We will present preliminary results using these hydrologic simulations to model spatially explicit annual wildfire occurrence historically and under the above-cited future climate scenarios, and discuss how these results are being integrated with process-based ecosystem models and field data to model changes in carbon flux across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem landscape (8). 1. Westerling, Hidalgo, Cayan, Swetnam, Science 313, 940 (2006). 2. Tymstra, Flannigan, Armitage, Logan, Int’l J. Wildland Fire 16, 153 (2007). 3. U. S. G. A. O. GAO. (2007). 4. Liang, Lettenmaier, Wood, Burges. J. Geophys. Res. 99(D7), 14,415 (1994). 5. Maurer, Wood, Adam, Lettenmaier, Nijssen. J. Climate 15:3237 (2002). 6. Cayan, Maurer, Dettinger, Tyree, Hayhoe. Climatic Change 87(Suppl. 1) 21 (2008). 7. Hidalgo, Dettinger Cayan, CEC Report CEC-500-2007-123 (2008). 8. We acknowledge support from the Joint Fire Science Program (Project ID 09-3-01-47), the NOAA RISA program for California, and the US Forest Service.

Western US Forest managers face more wildfires than ever before, and it is increasingly imperative to anticipate the consequences of this trend. Large fires in the northern Rocky Mountains have increased in association with warmer temperatures, earlier snowmelt, and longer fire seasons (1), and this trend is likely to continue with global warming (2). Increased wildfire occurrence is already a concern shared by managers from many federal land-management agencies (3). However, new analyses for the western US suggest that future climate could diverge even more rapidly from past climate than previously suggested. Current model projections suggest end-of-century hydroclimatic conditions like those of 1988 (the year of the well-known Yellowstone Fires) may represent close to the average year rather than an extreme year. The consequences of a shift of this magnitude for the fire regime, post-fire succession and carbon (C) balance of western forest ecosystems are well beyond what scientists have explored to date, and may fundamentally change the potential of western forests to sequester atmospheric C. We link hydroclimatic extremes (spring and summer temperature and cumulative water-year moisture deficit) to extreme fire years in northern Rockies forests, using large forest fire histories and 1/8-degree gridded historical hydrologic simulations (1950 - 2005) (4) forced with historical gridded temperature and precipitation (5). The frequency of extremes in hydroclimate associated with historic severe fire years in the northern Rocky Mountains is compared to those projected under a range of climate change projections, using global climate model runs for the A2 and B1 emissions pathways for three global climate models (NCAR PCM1, GFDL CM2.1, CNRM CM3). Coarse-scale climatic variables are downscaled to a 1/8 degree grid and used to force hydrologic simulations (6, 7). We will present preliminary results using these hydrologic simulations to model spatially explicit annual wildfire occurrence historically and under the above-cited future climate scenarios, and discuss how these results are being integrated with process-based ecosystem models and field data to model changes in carbon flux across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem landscape (8). 1. Westerling, Hidalgo, Cayan, Swetnam, Science 313, 940 (2006). 2. Tymstra, Flannigan, Armitage, Logan, Int’l J. Wildland Fire 16, 153 (2007). 3. U. S. G. A. O. GAO. (2007). 4. Liang, Lettenmaier, Wood, Burges. J. Geophys. Res. 99(D7), 14,415 (1994). 5. Maurer, Wood, Adam, Lettenmaier, Nijssen. J. Climate 15:3237 (2002). 6. Cayan, Maurer, Dettinger, Tyree, Hayhoe. Climatic Change 87(Suppl. 1) 21 (2008). 7. Hidalgo, Dettinger Cayan, CEC Report CEC-500-2007-123 (2008). 8. We acknowledge support from the Joint Fire Science Program (Project ID 09-3-01-47), the NOAA RISA program for California, and the US Forest Service.

Climate change is likely to alter wildfire regimes, but the magni- tude and timing of potential climate-driven changes in regional fire regimes are not well understood. We considered how the occurrence, size, and spatial location of large fires might respond to climate projections in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem (GYE) (Wyoming), a large wildland ecosystem dominated by conifer forests and characterized by infrequent, high-severity fire. We de- veloped a suite of statistical models that related monthly climate data (1972–1999) to the occurrence and size of fires >200 ha in the northern Rocky Mountains; these models were cross-validated and then used with downscaled (∼12 km × 12 km) climate projections from three global climate models to predict fire occurrence and area burned in the GYE through 2099. All models predicted sub- stantial increases in fire by midcentury, with fire rotation (the time to burn an area equal to the landscape area) reduced to <30 y from the historical 100–300 y for most of the GYE. Years without large fires were common historically but are expected to become rare as annual area burned and the frequency of regionally synchronous fires increase. Our findings suggest a shift to novel fire–climate– vegetation relationships in Greater Yellowstone by midcentury be- cause fire frequency and extent would be inconsistent with persis- tence of the current suite of conifer species. The predicted new fire regime would transform the flora, fauna, and ecosystem processes in this landscape and may indicate similar changes for other sub- alpine forests.