Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative

Primary role

To achieve its vision across 2,100 mi (3,400 km), Y2Y protects core wildlife habitats, keeps those habitats connected and inspires others to engage in similar work.

Y2Y highlights and focuses on local issues that have implications for the region as a whole. The organization engages in landscape-scale conservation, an approach that focuses on actions and management across large areas, such as entire watersheds.

The organization collaborates with hundreds of partners across the Rocky Mountains, including conservation groups, landowners, businesses, government agencies, Indigenous governments, scientists, and local communities. Their goal is to create a unified movement supporting large-scale land conservation that protects wildlife habitats while balancing human needs, creating corridors that allow animals to move freely and promoting coexistence between nature and communities.

History

Between 1991 and 1993, Pluie, a wolf radio-collared in southern Alberta, was tracked as it traveled more than 40,000 mi² (100,000 km²) and covered an area 10 times the size of Yellowstone National Park and 15 times that of Banff National Park. Pluie crossed more than 30 different political jurisdictions (including three states, two provinces, private lands, and First Nation’s territories) before being shot and killed in a legal hunt south of Kootenay National Park in December 1995.

The scientific research Pluie's movements showed wildlife needed larger areas than biologists thought and pointed to a need to connect large sections of habitat along the spine of the Rocky Mountains as the best method to ensure there would be wildlife and wild spaces thriving into the future. Other animals such as lynx, cougars, golden eagles and bull trout have also been recorded traveling distances of more than 1,000 mi (1,600 km). These movements inspired people to reconsider the scale nature needs to thrive and also launched the formative idea behind Y2Y.

The Yellowstone-to-Yukon region is one of the most ambitious corridor projects on the North American continent. Since 1993, Yellowstone to Yukon's conservationists have supported wildlife crossings over and under highways, helped track wolverines and purchased more than 500,000 acres of land to preserve wildlife routes.

Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative's mission and model has inspired other similar collaborations including:

• Algonquin to Adirondacks Collaborative to connect lands and people from Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada to the Adirondacks in New York State
• Great Eastern Ranges Initiative in Australia to connect reserves along 2,235 mi (3,597 km) of the Great Eastern Ranges
• Two Countries-One Forest to connect the Northern Appalachian-Acadian ecoregions of Canada and U.S.
• Baja to Bering Marine Initiative between Baja, California and Bering Sea off the Pacific Coast of North America

Priorities

To work successfully over such a large transboundary landscape with a diversity of challenges and opportunities, Y2Y states their mission demands a multi-pronged approach.

The organization engages on projects within three program areas: landscape protection, landscape connection and communities and conservation, paired with science and Indigenous knowledge and policy and government relations. Stated 2030 goals include:

1. Landscape protection: Protect 30 percent of the Yellowstone to Yukon region.
2. Landscape connection: Safeguard four key wildlife corridors by restoring animal movement across the busiest roads and advancing voluntary private land conservation.
3. Communities and conservation: Ensure communities incorporate tools and approaches that support what nature and people need at the Yellowstone to Yukon scale.
4. Policy and government relations: Work closely with communities and decision-makers to make a positive impact in the Yellowstone to Yukon region, supporting Y2Y’s vision and priority conservation outcomes shared by partners. Ensure enduring conservation by promoting a strong policy framework of laws and practices to advance Y2Y’s non-partisan policy goals at all government levels, including Indigenous, federal, state, provincial, territorial, and global.
5. Science and Indigenous knowledge: Use the best available information, including science and Indigenous and local knowledge, to guide conservation efforts in the Yellowstone to Yukon region.

Conservation achievements

From 1993-2018, the actions of Y2Y and partners resulted in an 80.5 percent increase in growth of key protected areas. During the same time period, protected areas in the Yellowstone to Yukon region grew by 7.8 percent, by 41,424 mi² (107,290 km²).

Research shows the Yellowstone to Yukon region is home to the world’s most intact, least developed mountain system with 15.6 percent protection. The lands for this percentage are drawn from the IUCN protected area categories.

Photography and media

A 2005 book by Karsten Heuer, Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bears' Trail, detailed the wildlife biologist and park warden's 18-month journey with his dog from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming to the Canadian Yukon by hiking, skiing, and paddling across mountains, forests, and rivers.

In 2011, Yellowstone to Yukon: the Journey of Wildlife and Art, a collaborative exhibition curated by the National Museum of Wildlife Art, the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, artist Dwayne Harty, cofounder Harvey Locke and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative featured images, art and stories from the Yellowstone-to-Yukon region, and was eventually published as a book.

A 2016 episode of Nova titled Wild Ways featured Y2Y's work and how newly established wildlife corridors offer hope to the planet's endangered species.